Graphics Cards You Need to Dive Into Virtual Reality
Whether or not you have an HMD (head-mounted display) to play VR games or not, most people want to at least be able to play all their favorite games at high detail settings in Full-HD (1920X1080) anyway. It makes sense to build your next system to be VR-ready, it is the benchmark for when you are making your new system future-proof for the next few years to come. It takes a fair amount of grunt to power those two super-mini monitors for your eyeballs in the HMD at 90 FPS (frames per second)!
To know which graphics cards are capable of running VR properly, it's easy with ROG and ASUS - just check on the box! There you will find a VR-Ready badge, and for the latest ROG Strix VR-Ready graphics cards you will also find VR-friendly HDMI ports in case you need an extra HDMI port for your monitor as well.
Bear in mind, for different VR options the minimum requirements are slightly different. Here are graphics cards to make your VR games great regardless.
ROG Strix GTX 1080
The flagship with 2560 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR5X (only available on the GTX 1080) video memory on the 256-bit interface running at 10GHz (effective) - this is a no-brainer, if the monstrous ROG Strix GTX 1080 can't power VR, nothing can! (we didn't forget about the Titan X, very few people have that kind of budget). Read reviews from HardOCP and TechPowerUp.
ROG Strix GTX 1070
Armed with 1920 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR5 video memory, ROG Strix GTX 1070 is faster than any of of the previous generation cards. Read the review from Guru3D and Hardware Canucks here.
ROG Strix GTX 1060
If the ROG Strix GTX 1060 is still VR-ready, you get an idea of how much power is in the new Pascal range of graphics cards! Read reviews from KitGuru and Hexus.
ROG Matrix/Poseidon GTX 980 Ti
GTX 980 Ti was king of the hill less than six months ago, if you can pick up a good deal, ROG Poseidon GTX 980 Ti has a custom-designed hybrid cooler dubbed DirectCU H2O for both air or liquid cooling. ROG Matrix GTX 980 Ti comes with an even higher clock. Here's the review from TweakTown.
ASUS GTX 980 - 20th Anniversary Gold Edition
Before GTX 980 Ti, this 20th Anniversary Gold Edition card was the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the planet, rest assured this will deliver VR gaming performance without a hitch. This limited edition card is definitely one for the collectors. Here's a review from goldfries.
Strix GTX 970
At least a GTX 970 is what you need to get into VR gaming, the Strix GTX 970 and ASUS GTX 970 DC Mini are your best bet when building a compact PC with the power to run VR games. Here are reviews from eTeknix and bit-tech.
ROG Strix RX 480
The new Polaris architecture on the ROG Strix RX 480 paired with 8GB of GDDR5 video memory and a great price make this a very enticing card as your next upgrade. The same DirectCU III cooling unit and AURA SYNC RGB lighting as the ROG Strix GTX 1080/70/60 make this a great alternative. Read the review from TechPowerUp here.
Strix R9 Fury
The Strix R9 Fury excels in high resolution gaming with the help from 4GB of on-chip HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) operating at 500MHz on a whopping 4,096-bit memory bus. Read the review from PC Gamer.
Strix R9 390X / 390
Both Strix R9 390X and R9 390 are powered by the 28nm Grenada GPU based on the GCN 1.1 architecture and loaded with a huge 8GB of GDDR5 video memory each, . The 390X has slightly more shading cores, TMUs (texture mapping units), and a higher clock. This was a real bang for your buck. Read reviews from Legit Reviews and OCAHOLIC.
SLI/CrossFire or Overclock your way into VR?
Got a graphics card that you still want to make use of? It probably occured to you that doubling up should give you enough power to satisfy the high VR requirements. Not so fast... game support for for SLI and CrossFire is still maturing so don't expect all your games to be supported.
So now what? If you have one of the following cards, some may be a couple years old but for many games they should still be fine since they are factory-overclocked, you can also try tweaking them some more using the bundled software GPU Tweak II.
