epdm2be :
Especially since sales of desktop machines is declining. Soon only high-end gaming rigs or the ultra-cheap office crap will be available. To that end I hope decent desktop machines that are "good enough" for (current gen) VR and games become increasingly more popular soon and drive people away from stupid consoles back into computers. Perhaps this is just my pipedream but any new tech, whether it is overhyped or not , helps in this matter.
I really don't think the overall decline in PC sales is from a lack of interest in PC gaming. People are not dumping PCs en masse to move to consoles, and in fact the PC gaming market has been growing faster than the console gaming market for years.
The decline in PC sales is more due to other parts of the PC market, particularly those lower-end systems used for office work or web browsing not getting replaced as often, which makes sense, since the rate in advancement of new hardware is slowing, and existing hardware already meets the demands for most desktop software. And of course, lots of people do more of their general computing tasks on smartphones now as well. So these declines are happening more in the casual and office use markets more than anything.
techgeek :
I'm not a console gamer, but the reality is if new tech isn't adopted by the consoles it's usually doomed to failure. So if we want raytracing and VR to succeed, then they need to be implemented at some level in the next generation of consoles.
VR already is implemented at some level on at least the PS4, and with over 3 million units sold so far, the PSVR outnumbers sales of the Vive and Rift combined. 3 million is still only a small portion of the 80+ million PS4 consoles out there though. I do suspect that VR will likely play a larger role in the next generation of consoles though.
As for raytracing, that's arguably a bit different. You don't need raytracing-capable hardware to run a game that features raytraced effects, so it should be treated as an advanced lighting effect. It may require some additional development resources to implement properly, but it's not like VR where the game needs to be built around it from the ground up. I suspect popular game engines like Unreal will make it fairly easy to apply raytraced effects, which can simply fall back on less-advanced effects should the appropriate hardware not be available.
techgeek :
To make matters worse for VR is the high cost of entry. First you need a beefy GPU, but then on top of that you need the VR equipment.
This is still somewhat true, but it has been getting a bit better. Windows Mixed Reality headsets have been available for a while for as little as $200-$250 with controllers, which I would say is very reasonable, even if their ergonomics and controller tracking might not be quite as nice as something like a Vive or Rift for a couple hundred dollars more. Eventually, we will likely see further price drops for the original Vive and Rift as well, and perhaps even updated budget models with as good or better specs to complement their next generation of higher-end hardware.
The graphics card market seems to be recovering from the mining craze as well, and an RX 580 can be had for a little over $200 now, which will likely do a reasonable job running most existing VR games. Depending on how the 2060 performs and is priced, we will likely see even better performance in the sub-$300 price range within the next few months, and I imagine AMD will be offering some good competition in that performance range not too long thereafter.