There's an unfortunate truth about virtual reality that many consumers aren't aware of: it requires tremendous processing power. Companies like Oculus VR have been hard at work developing what will eventually be consumer grade virtual reality solutions for the market, and along the way they have faced several obstacles. If it wasn't headset comfort, they were dealing with image quality issues. And then the problem of perceived image latency presented itself, with hundreds of hours of testing indicating that headsets need to display at well above 60 frames per second in order to provide an experience that didn't make users feel sick to their stomach.
While Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have the benefit of increasingly more powerful hardware to work with in order to achieve both high frame rate and resolution, Sony is stuck with using its several year old PS4 hardware design. In the case of simple, non-intense games like Minecraft it isn't a significant challenge optimize a game for the 1080p headset. However, in the case of experiences like Gran Turismo Sport and other titles looking to delivery modern visual fidelity, the PS4's underclocked 1.8GHz FX8120 and HD 7870 equivalent internals come as a huge bottleneck.
Sony has encountered this during its internal testing, and has had no choice but to include an external processor with the PlayStation VR. As reported by Eurogamer, the current development headset includes an in-line box sized at 140 x 140 x 35mm that houses both a 12v power supply a processing unit, so much that even dedicated fan cooling is included.
Perhaps the greatest consequence of this turn of events is that the price of the headset will have to account for this hardware inclusion. When virtual reality headsets are already expected to debut at $350 or higher due to the cost of their displays and lower volume production runs, this could mean that the PlayStation VR will be priced the same or even higher than its much more sophisticated competition.
Virtual reality is expected to be a game-changer for many people, but with an inevitably high cost of adoption and limited software options it has a tough road ahead, especially on PS4.
