Anyone know how well this works on lower-tier video cards? I have an Nvidia 950 and I'm tempted to buy the Vive. The problem is that the suggested specs are a 970 minimum, which easily has 30% more performance than my 950.
It seems strange to be willing to drop $800 on a headset and not spend $400 on a video card. However, the next generation of video cards is the generation that finally gets off the 28nm node, so I'm expecting a huge performance bump. It would be nice to be able to wait for that.
HTC claims their 16nm process is 65% faster than 28nm, takes 1/2 the area, and 1/3 the power. For a video card, doubling the # of transistors basically translates into double the performance, and even the lower power requirements enable faster cards because high end cards are often power limited. Throw in a bit of performance improvement from architectural improvements, and it's certainly possible that the next gen of video cards will have 3X the performance of current cards.
Fast video cards are important enough to VR that if that kind of power is available, it's going to be used. A 970 may be enough now, but I don't think it's going to be enough for long.
I would assume you could play VR games with reduced texture quality and/or other gfx settings.
Anyway, I think it would probably be OK to order it now and expect to have access to a reasonable percent of the content, and then wait a few months to upgrade the GPU when the next gen from AMD and Nvidia comes out.