Dell beefs up Oculus-Ready PCs with AMD Radeon graphics

Radeon R9 GPUs and LiquidVR tech should make for some potent machines

AMD has announced that it will be providing Dell with graphics solutions for the company's 'Oculus-Ready' PCs.

As you're no doubt aware, virtual reality is set to be the big thing next year, and the Oculus Rift is one of the most keenly awaited VR devices. Oculus-Ready PCs are simply those which have been certified as powerful enough to run the Rift capably, and they'll be coming from a number of PC vendors.

Dell's offerings will start at $999 (around £660), and will be powered by AMD Radeon R9 GPUs, which incorporate AMD's LiquidVR technology.

As the name suggests, LiquidVR is designed to enable a slick and fast flowing virtual reality experience, with the tech promising low latency, and comfortable VR gaming with hopefully none of the nausea some folks have reported when testing out devices like the Rift.

AMD also claims that LiquidVR overcomes common pitfalls seen with virtual reality and offers a greater sense “presence”, that feeling of actually being there in the virtual world.

Both Dell and Alienware (Dell makes Alienware machines, of course) will be pushing out Oculus-Ready PCs, although specific models have not yet been revealed – but they should be soon.

Frank Azor, Co-founder and General Manager, Alienware, commented: “For nearly 20 years Alienware has been a leader in performance and innovation for PC gaming; virtual reality is the next frontier and we plan to innovate and lead in the same way, with the same passion.

“Partnering with the performance of AMD graphics and the innovation of Oculus provides an incredible opportunity for Alienware to deliver something awesome for our users.”

Another PC maker, Asus, has already named a couple of its Oculus-Ready machines, which will be the Asus G11CD and the ROG G20CB, although again the actual specs haven't been revealed.

Also check out: HTC Vive looks better than Oculus Rift to us

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for T3 across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel was published by Hachette UK in 2013).