Ars System Guide, VR edition: Cheap VR, great VR, and optional 4k craziness

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

You may consider yourself an enterprising PC game-machine builder, and in the past few years, you may have built a pretty damned good rig. That doesn't mean you went crazy, however. Graphics standards have leveled off a bit lately-at least, enough for a reasonably priced machine to run "max" settings at the standard screen resolution of 1080p or even rock-solid frame rates and high fidelity at 1440p.

Those specs are still within quite reasonable reach, but system builders may now want to target two additional, beefier visual standards: 4K monitors and virtual reality headsets.

The former can mean a few different resolutions, but this goal typically quadruples the pixel count of standard 1080p resolution. And while the retail Oculus and Vive headsets have fewer pixels than 4K displays, they have to refresh content at 90 frames-per-second to offset nausea concerns-which far outpace the demands of a standard 1080p/60 display. Either way, if you haven't built a new PC in a while, you're gonna need a bigger boat.

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