HTC’s new Vive VR headset is a love letter to PC gamers

The new HTC VIVE Focus Vision supports SteamVR over DisplayPort at PCVR at 120Hz, and features eye tracking and high-resolution lenses.

There’s another new VR gaming headset in town, and this one has PC gamers in its mixed-reality sights. The new HTC Vive Focus Vision can function as a decent standalone VR headset, thanks to its Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip and 12GB of RAM, but HTC is also making a big effort to appeal to PC gamers who want a high-end headset to tether to their rig.

You might know HTC better as the company that briefly had a big boom in the early days of Android smartphones, with devices such as the Desire and One, but it’s been in the VR game for a good few years now, making some of the best VR headset models you can buy. HTC might not have the same big market presence as Meta, but there’s some decent hardware inside its new headset.

For PC gamers, the big deal is its support for DisplayPort PCVR gaming via a USB-C connection, with the ability to refresh at 120Hz (though HTC says this feature won’t be available at launch), and a high resolution of 2,448 x 2,448 resolution per eye.

“With DisplayPort, gamers and enterprise users alike can enjoy content exactly as the developers intended, without degradation of quality,” says the company. “This is perfect for PCVR gamers who have SteamVR game collections.” Comparatively, the Valve Index has a resolution of 1,440 x 1,600 per eye.

HTC Vive Focus Vision specs

Other features of the HTC VIVE Focus Vision include a pair of front-facing, 16-megapixel cameras, which support stereoscopic 3D pass-through, for mixed reality (also known as augmented reality) features, and the headset also offers a 120-degree field of view.

In addition, the new VR headset has an eye-tracking feature. This automatically adjusts the interpupillary distance (IPD) of the lenses to make it easier to share the headset with your friends and family, saving you from having to manually set it up for a different pair of eyes each time. There’s also an infrared sensor, which HTC says can help with hand tracking in conditions where there isn’t much light.

Meanwhile, the standalone VR features include the aforementioned Qualcomm SoC, as well as 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM (4GB more than the Meta Quest 3), and a 128GB ROM, which is expandable to up to 2TB if you use a microSD card. The controllers look good too, with Hall Effect sensors on the trigger and grip buttons, for example. HTC also says the new headset has a two-hour battery life, compared to three hours on the Meta Quest 3.

Pre-orders for the HTC Vive Focus Vision are now live, but they’re not cheap, with the new VR headset priced at $999 (£999). On the plus side, if you put in your order before October 17, 2024, HTC will also throw a wired DisplayPort streaming kit into the bargain, which usually costs $159.

If you already have a VR headset, and you’re not tempted to spend $999 on an upgrade (which is perfectly understandable), check out our guide to the best VR games, where we take you through all our favorite VR titles right now.