Oculus Offers Comprehensive List of VR GPUs Meeting Recommended and Minimum Specs

With so many choices for graphics cards out there, it’s hard to know exactly what you should buy to outfit your next VR-ready PC. To make things a little easier, Oculus recently published a list of GPUs that meets its Minimum and Recommended specs. The list helps clear up confusion regarding which older and less popular GPUs the company considers ‘equivalent’ to the company’s prior recommendations which often consisted of just one GPU from NVIDIA and one GPU from AMD.

Minimum Spec GPUs

You’ll need a powerful GPU for VR, though if you’re on a tight budget, Oculus introduced some tech (ASW) which helped lower the bar a bit more, and led to the creation of the ‘Oculus Minimum Spec’.

The company does warn that some Rift content may require a computer that “exceeds Oculus’s minimum or recommended specs,” and that you should always keep an eye on the recommended specs when browsing content in the Oculus Store. That said, here’s the current list of GPU that the company considers is powerful enough to meet the Oculus Minimum spec:

• NVIDIA GTX 960 (4GB)
• NVIDIA GTX 1050 (4GB)
• NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti
• NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti (laptop)
• NVIDIA GTX 980M
• AMD RX 470.

Recommended Spec GPUs

GPUs meeting the Oculus Recommended spec will give you smooth VR rendering without relying on ASW (which can introduce unwanted graphical artifacts). While all the cards on this list ought to render Oculus experiences smoothly, the higher-end cards will let you crank the graphical nobs up in many games, sometimes substantially increasing visual fidelity. Learn how to use supersampling to sharpen any Rift game (if your GPU can handle it).

*not in order of performance or price

*not in order of performance or price

If you’re in doubt about whether other parts of your PC can handle VR, download the compatibility check tool published by Oculus to see if your computer’s guts have what it takes.