That way, we can see how the experience evolves versus how much money you're spending, and whether shelling out the top dollar for the Valve Index is really worth it. To set the baseline experience, I started with my cheapest VR headset, the Oculus Quest, before moving up the VR food chain based on price. I also played the game on High quality when testing each headset, and I used a mixture of its teleport and continuous movement modes. To make sure that PC performance isn't an issue here, I've used the following components to keep Half-Life: Alyx running nice and smoothly: an Intel Core i5-8600K CPU running at stock speeds, 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super graphics card (which is the minimum GPU I'd recommend for pushing into those higher quality settings), along with all the latest Windows 10 and graphics drivers installed. GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) / AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB) As I found out in my Half-Life: Alyx VR performance article, though, the minimum spec is really only best suited for playing the game on Low to Medium quality settings, especially if you want to make the most of your headset's top refresh rate.ĬPU: Intel Core i5-7500 / AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Which VR headset will emerge triumphant? Let's find out.Īs a brief reminder, here are Half-Life: Alyx's minimum PC requirements, which are all above what you need to get each of the headsets I've tested running in the first place. Below, I've put them all head to head (or should that be headset to headset?) to find out which one offers the absolute bestest best Half-Life: Alyx experience, rating them all for comfort, visual fidelity and how easy they are to use and play the game with.

To find out, I've tested the game with every VR headset I've been able to lay my hands on: the Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift S, the HTC Vive Cosmos, HTC Vive Cosmos Elite, and, of course, the Valve Index. The key question, though, is what VR headset offers the best Half-Life: Alyx experience? Heck, you can even play Half-Life: Alyx on Oculus Quest if you connect it to your PC via Oculus' Link software and a high-speed USB cable.

Half-Life: Alyx may have been built from the ground up to support Valve's super expensive Index headset, but as you may have seen from my Half-Life: Alyx PC requirements and VR headset specs article, you can actually play it on any VR headset that supports SteamVR, including the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift headsets and any Windows Mixed Reality headset.

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