Before shelling out $800 on an HTC Vive, you'd do well to remember that it requires a pretty powerful PC to drive it. In order to have a seamless virtual reality experience, your PC must be capable of rendering complex scenes at 2160x1200 resolution at 90 frames per second without a hitch.
Of course you can compare your system your system to the recommended hardware specs, but there is nothing more accurate than running an actual game and seeing how it goes. With that in mind, Valve has released a benchmarking tool that would run a two minutes demo and decide whether your PC is capable of running virtual reality applications smoothly. The tool also tells you whether your system is bottlenecked by PC, GPU or both.
You can download the Steam VR test app right now from Steam.
The recommended system specs for HTC Vive are as follows:
OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10
Processor: Intel i5-4590 / AMD FX 8350 equivalent or greater
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 / AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or greater
4.8GB hard drive space
