We recently learned the price of the HTC Vive and all that your money will get you, but there was still one major detail that had yet to be confirmed by HTC or Valve; what PC specs will it take to run Vive. The new SteamVR Performance Test is the tool that will give you all the details you need even though you haven’t bought the Vive yet. And we know you want to!
Valve’s new tool will evaluate your PC, or rig as those who custom built their own call them and it will give you a metered chart based on the hardware inside your box. The results of the test will let you know if you any of your equipment fails to meet the recommended specs to run a smooth VR experience with the HTC Vive or other VR Ready hardware on the SteamVR platform.
The handy little tool can be downloaded from the Steam store or the SteamDB site and will only take up approximately 18.37 MB before extraction. After you run the app on your computer you’ll find out if you need to get a new graphics processor or CPU or possibly both due to the details the Vive will need sent to those little displays in the Head Mounted Display.
Update: After a comment below from Andre and actually having the time to download the test it appears the download is much larger than I stated earlier. Steam reported the app to be 4700+ MB’s, but my download says the file ended up taking 1.9 GB of disk space. So depending on your network speed it could take a little while to download.
We’re curious to know who is going to buy the Vive and if you need a new computer to use it or if you’re already the gamer type? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: HTCVRGaming
Are you sure that “will only take up approximately 18.37 MB before extraction”? I downloaded it through Steam yesterday and it took 10 min at a constant 3.5Mbit/s speed, I think it´s like a 4Gb program…
Anyhow, I run it and it says that I have to upgrade my GTX670, of course, but the surprising part is that my 5 yeard old i5 2500K OCed to 4.3Ghz is still up to the task so I will only have to upgrade my GPU. Maybe I will wait for the upcoming Nvidia Pascal GPUs…
You are correct. I’m downloading it now and it’s approximately 4.7GB. I misread the info on the page I was looking at when I wrote the article. Thanks for catching it! In the meantime, it looks like I’m not going anywhere for a while 😉
U$ 800 for the Vive and you still need a PC to do the graphics? It’s just me or this Vive is very very expensive?