Basemark has announced its new VRScore PC benchmark, designed specifically to test whether your PC can run the smooth, high frame rates of commercial virtual reality. It’s even going so far as to call it the “world’s first comprehensive VR benchmark,” which is quite a claim to make, considering it’s not the only VR benchmark game in town.
Futuremark released its VR benchmark in November last year, so Basemark’s new benchmark joins much-lauded company. The new test supports both DirectX11 and 12, and features high-end visuals of an expansive world. Produced for Basemark by Crytek, the environment is designed to mimic a real game world and the explosive effects we can expect when playing high-end VR titles.
Much like a traditional 3D benchmark, Basemark’s VRScore spits out a score at the end to let you know how capable your PC is, but it goes beyond that with some specific VR metrics. It measures application to photon latency for the left and right eyes and gives you a custom report for particular headsets.
More: AMD just released an awesome new benchmark for DirectX 12 games – here’s how to use it
VRScore tracks what headset you have plugged in at the time and gives you a report based on that. However you don’t even need to have one to try the benchmark out. Indeed one of its best features is that it can give you an idea of how the demo would run on a range of different head-mounted displays. That way, if there any major differences, you can pick the headset that works best with your PC.
VRScore is currently available to select media in a limited guise, though there are corporate and “Corporate Premium,” versions available too. The professional version and free, consumer version will be released in the second quarter of this year. As with benchmarks from other developers, the free, consumer edition will have the least features of the lot.
Most versions will require an internet connection to run, meaning VRScore is an “always on,” piece of software. Interestingly enough, that’s a restriction that the Corporate Premium version does away with, including automated result submission.
Whether you like always-on or not, a new benchmark for virtual reality sounds useful. Do you think your PC is ready for it?
Updated 01-31-2017 by Jon Martindale: Made it clearer that Futuremark released a VR benchmark first.
