Hp and HTC May TEAM Up to make VR Games Affordable

Hp and HTC May TEAM Up to make VR Games Affordable

HP is said to be getting together with HTC in order to provide PCs specifically branded and designed for the latter company's VR headset, Vive.

Apparently the HP computers will be bundled with the HTC Vive and will obviously be powerful enough to be VR-ready, providing an entire virtual reality solution with a 'friendlier' price tag, according to DigiTimes, the source of this rumor.

Price has obviously been a big issue for the major VR headsets on the PC such as the Vive and Oculus Rift, as not only is the virtual reality hardware expensive itself, but so are the PCs with enough power to run them (or indeed the cost of upgrading a current PC with a new graphics card, and possibly other components).

GTX 1060 and all that

The good news is that with the latest graphics cards getting more powerful, the price barrier is at least lowering on the PC front – Nvidia's mainstream GTX 1060 is VR-ready, whereas with the previous generation of cards, you needed a GTX 970 to be VR-capable (the more affordable GTX 960 didn't cut it).

So it's a fair bet that HP will be building some machines based on the GTX 1060. And of course, on the AMD side, we also have the Radeon RX 480 which has made an entrance as a new more wallet-friendly VR-ready graphics card option.

As ever, all this is still speculation from the usual supply chain sources DigiTimes talks to, so keep your salt shaker handy and all that.

Unfortunately, the not-so-good news for the pricing of PCs from HP in the UK is that Brexit, and the unfavorable fall of the value of the pound compared to the US dollar, means that the price of the company's computers is set to rise by 10% in this country, at least in the near-term.