With Oculus Rift and HTC Vive set to start shipping virtual reality sets (VR) for commercial use in late March and early April (respectively), Valve wants to make sure your PC has enough oomph to handle the experience.
Available for free on Steam, SteamVR Performance Test is a diagnostic tool that runs a two-minute non-interactive sequence set in a Portal-like environment to determine the VR capabilities of your PC.
Unlike the Oculus benchmark tool that simply examines system specs, the SteamVR test analyzes how smoothly your PC runs VR content at 90fps and reports back the percentage of dropped frames.
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If StreamVR determines your PC is not ‘VR ready’, Valve’s diagnostic tool will precisely tell you whether it is your graphic card or processor (or both) that needs upgrading.
Unfortunately, as of now SteamVR cannot yet account for CPU load when it comes to positional tracking. Some users are also reporting that the benchmark tool fails to recognize multiple graphic cards.
➤ Valve uses ‘Portal’ robots to find out if your PC is VR-ready [Engadget]
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