AMD Partners With Dell And Oculus For VR Enabled PCs

In case it hasn't been noticeable enough, within the next few months, virtual reality is going to hit the market hard. The most anticipated headsets, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, are set to come out in early 2016, and it's expected that a bevy of content will stream out to the market at the same time. While there's still much up in the air with regards to pricing and availability, we'll no doubt be learning a lot more about that before the end of the year.

To have a good gaming experience in general, a good gaming PC is needed. But when VR is concerned, that reality is amplified. You need beefy hardware in order to power two images at once, and preferably at 120Hz per eye. It's for that reason that Oculus has come up with its 'Oculus Ready PC' program, which will result in some PCs sporting a special badge that lets consumers know that a particular PC is going to deliver a desirable experience.

So far, Oculus has announced that ASUS and Alienware have jumped on board with offering Oculus Ready PCs, and between those, it seems NVIDIA graphics cards have been the big focus (there are some exceptions, but one ASUS PC as an example could ship with one of five different GeForce models, while it offers just one AMD Radeon). Given that, it might seem that AMD is lagging behind a wee bit, but not so, as the company's latest press release highlights.

AMD today tells us that it's joined forces with Dell, and likewise Alienware, to deliver PCs powered by Radeon and its "LiquidVR" technologies. Roy Taylor, AMD's Corporate VP of Alliances and Content, says, "I’m confident that with Dell and Alienware, we can enable a wide audience of PC users with extraordinary VR capabilities powered by AMD Radeon GPUs."

It's impossible to know at this point which GPU vendor is going to offer the truly best experience, but you can feel confident in the fact that both AMD and NVIDIA are working ridiculously hard to make sure their respective solutions are solid for the launch of these forthcoming headsets.