If the Half-Life: Alyx announcement piqued your interest in VR, the timing’s pretty good, because we expect a few Black Friday deals to crop up over the next week. Just not right at this moment. The Samsung Odyssey+ is the lone discount right now, but more are coming. HTC has announced that, starting on Thursday, it’ll be taking $300 off the Vive Pro Starter Kit and $100 off its newest headset, the Vive Cosmos.
As for the Valve Index, my suspicion is that there won’t be a Black Friday discount. Anyone who pulled the trigger on one after the recent Half-Life: Alyx announcement would feel pretty burned, but you never know. The good news is that you don’t need an Index to play Half-Life: Alyx—it’ll be comparable with all of the headsets on this list. (Also, there are tons of other interesting VR games that aren’t Half-Life games.)
Modern virtual reality is a relatively young technology, but we’ve far surpassed the doldrums of the 90s and 2000s when VR seemed totally out of reach. It really is astounding the first time you experience a good, modern headset like the Oculus Quest, even if we’re not in Tron territory yet. Until then, though, there’s a lot to consider when buying one: convenience and comfort, price, and whether or not you’ve got a sensitive stomach or the right environment for VR. (Having lived in a San Francisco apartment for a while, I’m acutely aware that the quality of ‘room-scale’ VR is highly dependent on what you consider the size of a room to be.)
Scroll down for a quick breakdown of what to expect from each headset.
Black Friday VR headset deals
How to choose a VR headset
I can use a modern VR headset for an hour or more before it becomes at all uncomfortable, though I haven’t been prone to motion sickness since the banana pancakes road trip incident of 1993. Your mileage may vary, so it’s a good idea to try out a headset at a friend’s house or demo station before buying, if you can.
Outside of your sensitivity to motion sickness, the primary concerns when buying a VR headset are cost, convenience (wired or wireless?), comfort, and technical specs like screen resolution and field-of-view. You should also make sure your PC is powerful enough to run VR games at high framerates. To start with, I’d recommend an Nvidia GTX 1060 graphics card or higher. If you want the best experience on high-end VR hardware, an even more powerful card will be important.
As a brief primer, resolution (how many pixels each eye sees) and refresh rate (how many images per second the screens can display) are the numbers that get the most attention, as they affect the quality of the image and how quickly it refreshes as you look around. Higher refresh rates should mean less of a disconnect between you and the world you’re inhabiting.
It would be a mistake, however, to make blanket statements based on those numbers alone. The Oculus headsets can’t match the refresh rate of the Valve Index, but that doesn’t mean they offer a piss poor experience. In fact, when considering comfort, price, and convenience, the Oculus Quest is currently our favorite headset despite its lower specs. Many factors, including optics design, tracking latency, and display technology, factor into how a headset feels to use.
All of the headsets listed here are good picks depending on your budget, and we go into more detail in our VR headset buying guide.
As a final thought, consider how invested you really are in VR. Are you going to be able to disconnect from the world around you for an hour or more at a time, or do you have concerns like small children that require awareness of your surroundings? Do you have enough space near your PC for room-scale movement, or will you have to play standing still or sitting? Your answers to questions like these should help you determine how much to spend.
High-end: SteamVR headsets
SteamVR headsets are built to work with Valve’s tracking system of the same name, and the primary options are the HTC Vive, HTC Vive Pro, HTC Vive Cosmos, and the Valve Index. The latter two are the top-of-the-line VR picks, with the Index sporting dual 120Hz 1440×1600 displays with an “experimental” 144Hz mode, fancy off-ear headphones, finger-tracking controllers, and a 130-degree field of view. We consider it the best high-end VR headset, but those luxuries mean it costs $999 for a full kit.
We’ve yet to test the new Vive Cosmos—our friends at Tom’s Hardware liked it well enough—but it similarly aims for the high-end market, with 1400×1700 per-eye resolution at 90Hz. We did like the Vive Pro, which didn’t blow us away with its resolution increase over the original but is much more comfortable.
These headsets are for people who want to go all out and create a semi-dedicated space for VR play with a fairly powerful PC. If you’re not quite ready to commit to that, you may be happier with one of the cheaper (but still good) headsets below.
Mid-range: Oculus headsets
In the more reasonable VR headset price range are the two newest Oculus headsets, which are both $400: the Oculus Quest and the the Oculus Rift S. The Quest is currently our all-around favorite VR headset, offering a wireless, all-in-one VR experience—there’s no fiddling with tracking sensors or HDMI cables.
The Oculus Quest won’t be able to run Half-Life: Alyx with its built in processing, but Oculus is currently beta testing a link cable that allows Quest users to play games from a PC, and so by the time Alyx releases, it will be compatible at the loss of that wireless freedom. (This is something we’ll have to test before declaring it a success, but given that Valve advertises it as an option, it should work.)
The Oculus Rift S must be connected to your PC like the original Oculus Rift, and with it you can play SteamVR games, as well as Oculus exclusives available through its store, such as Stormland. Rather than using external sensors like the Vive Pro and Index, the Rift S uses “inside out” tracking like the Quest, meaning that all of the motion tracking instruments are contained within the headset.
At $400 without any discounts, the Quest and Rift S are significantly cheaper than their competitors, which means they can’t muster the same specs. The Rift S offers a 1280×1440 per-eye resolution, 80Hz refresh rate, and a 110-degree field of view. The Oculus Quest ups the per-eye resolution to 1440X1600 and has a better OLED display, but only manages 75Hz and a 100-degree field of view.
It may sound like you’re taking a huge quality hit if you don’t shell out a grand for a Valve Index, but I have a the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift, and it can still impress me even with its lower resolution. That’s not to say I wouldn’t happily play VR games on an Index if one fell into my lap, but that kind of spending isn’t needed to enjoy VR.
Also existing: Windows Mixed Reality headsets
Windows Mixed Reality headsets get the least attention, but don’t be deceived by the name. While Microsoft is pushing augmented reality (headsets which combine the real world with 3D graphics), the Windows Mixed Reality platform is also used by VR-focused headsets like the Samsung Odyssey+, which is our pick for the best WMR headset and features 1440×1600 per-eye resolution at 90 Hz and a 110-degree field of view.
WMR headsets work with SteamVR games and Microsoft Store VR apps, so you won’t be left out of anything but Oculus exclusives by picking one up. (And with some tinkering, it is possible to get SteamVR and WMR headsets to work with Oculus exclusives.)