Nvidia’s VR Funhouse is a tech demo to test your PC’s limits

Nvidia has released VR Funhouse, its first-ever video game, and it should give your PC a serious workout — even if you’ve just bought one of the company’s powerful new GTX 1080 or 1070 GPUs.

VR Funhouse is basically a collection of carnival-themed virtual reality minigames with advanced physics and visual effects built upon Unreal Engine 4. Nvidia warns that the game will run on low graphics settings even with a 980 Ti or 1070 card, or medium with a single 1080; you’ll need two 1080s running in SLI tandem, or one with a 980 Ti to serve as a backup physics card, for the best results. So yeah, this is a resource-heavy game even by VR standards. And of course, you’ll need an HTC Vive as well.

With my single-1080 rig, the results are still impressive. The minigames — including things like skeet shooting, archery, and firing goo into clowns’ mouths to make liquid-filled balloons explode above their heads — are all designed to push the technical limits of VR, which hasn’t been the priority for most developers at this nascent stage of the medium. As a game it’s, well, fun albeit shallow, but the real point is to look at all the pretty particles cascade around you when you pop a balloon with a sword.

If you have a Vive and a recent high-end Nvidia GPU, VR Funhouse is well worth checking out. It’s available now on Steam for free, and Nvidia also plans to open-source it later this summer so that developers can create their own games with the same technology.