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Conina on 03 January 2016
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NVIDIA expects 25 Million PC Gamers To Adopt Virtual Reality: http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gameworks-vr-large-scale-vr-adoption/#ixzz3wBZyJ3FZ

The most interesting part IMHO is this sentence: "According to Jason, out of the entire PC installed base, there are just about 13 million PCs in the market that are able to run VR perfectly." I'm sure their "perfectly" is based on the Oculus Rift recommendation for the "full VR experience": https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/the-rifts-recommended-spec-pc-sdk-0-6-released-and-mobile-vr-jam-voting/

With the Steam Hardware surveys I already try to figure out, how many active gaming PCs have similar (or faster) hardware than XBO + PS4... my latest guess is around 30 million. That number assumes a growth of 5 million Steam accounts per month... but with Valve's constant silence about their numbers since February, I got worried that the growth rate has gone down.

So with this new information from Nvidia in combination of the Oculus recommendation, I added a "VR recommended" section of the Steam data. GTX780 and 780 ti have almost the same performance as the GTX970 / R9 290, so I included them and ended up with 11.3 million Steam-PCs ready for the "full VR experience".

So my estimate (11.3 million) is a bit below of Nvidia's estimate (13 million), with December numbers of Valve it will come quite close. This gives me confidence that my educated guess of (5 million growth of Steam PCs per month) ain't totally absurd and that the number of Steam-PCs on XBO/PS4 level is also realistic.

Nevertheless I hope that Valve breaks the silence soon and tells us new numbers of active Steam accounts, so I can make adjustments.

 

P.S.: Damn, now I followed the link to the original interview: "By next year, when the first major PC-based VR headsets ship, there will be about 13 million PCs in the market that will be powerful enough to run VR — in the right way."

So he expects 13 million VR-ready PCs, when Oculus Rift launches, not now. So I hope the Oculus Rift launch is soon. :(

Now I'm worried again about the PC gaming growth rate... Valve: please give us actual numbers!