Hey, d’you wanna know if your PC can handle a virtual reality headset? Course you do. It’d be a bit of a shitter if you forked out £410 quid for an Oculus Rift and it didn’t run, after all. Fortunately, Valve have released a free Portal themed app on Steam to help you out.
The test isn’t specifically tuned for the Vive. Instead, you can test your system to see the level of fidelity your computer can run VR at.
The demo features a two-minute segment from Valve’s Aperture Robot Repair VR demo. You watch stuff happen, and get your all important results once the demo is over.
The results get deep into the tech nitty gritty. You’ll be told the average fidelity, the number of frames tested, and if the demo ever dared to run below 90 frames per second. In addition, it recommends which piece of hardware needs upgrading if your PC isn’t VR-ready.
Oculus released a simpler test that just tells you if your hardware meets the system requirements or not – but it loses points for no Portal.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.