The hardware doesn't matter; some people just cannot stand certain forms of stimulation-without-movement that occurs with virtual reality. I can't play FPS or watch videos containing lots of movement on large screens for this reason, and I doubt the experience would be any different for VR; if anything, making the graphics more realistic would exacerbate the situation.
Who's making such a claim about VR? People who think Michael Abrash made this claim simply didn't read his white paper closely enough. Here's what he said:
> …VR may be best with slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction, in which case we’ll have to learn how to create fun games around that.
Longer quote and more discussion in my earlier comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249118
It's definitely less likely to cause sickness than some of the other genres, but not guaranteed safe.
Hence why hardware does matter
While it won't help every case, for the vast majority the motion sickness is alleviated when the head tracking is better (accurate positional tracking and low latency).
You can make pretty much anyone feel sick if you add enough lag to the display.
that is to say, you can probably not eliminate motion sickness entirely in all cases, but without care it's probably not hard to catalyze either.