Research company Trendforce has identified that the PC gaming market is currently one of the niche segments that has huge opportunities. As a result, an increasing number of electronics brands are aggressively establishing themselves in the gaming PC hardware market.

In part this is due to the inevitable rise of VR devices that are expected to generate demand for new and better hardware. TrendForce predicts that the worldwide market for gaming PCs and their peripherals will reach US$24.35 billion in 2016.

It says that ‘VR ready’ branding will become a driver in desktop PC sales. In part that will be by the inclusion of a high end GPU (graphics processing unit) like NVIDIA or AMD Radeon.

The boom of online gaming in recent years, along with the enthusiastic promotion of e-sports tournaments, has attracted many PC brands to participate and actively develop the vast gaming market. 

Gaming PCs received a lot of exposure at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Products from new entrants to the gaming market include Acer’s Predator series, Lenovo’s Y series and machines from AORUS, a high-end brand under Taiwan-based hardware vendor GIGABYTE.

Many ‘enterprise’ brands also showed off their latest offerings at the CES. Dell introduced mid-range and low-end gaming machines from its Inspiron line in addition to high-end products from its well-recognized gaming brand Alienware. ASUS and MSI also unveiled additions to their gaming product lines (e.g. ASUS’s ROG gaming hardware).

TrendForce says that purchase decisions in the PC gaming market are very much tied to brand recognition and loyalty, so new entrants will have difficulties changing the existing orders by simply relying on aggressive pricing.

Instead, they will have to create differentiation with unique peripherals for gaming PCs. For instance, games developers and consumers have been asking for better displays that can process higher-detailed graphics and have faster refresh time. In the near future, mainstream gaming notebook PCs, such as the 15.6- and 17.3-inch models, will adopt 4K resolution to set themselves apart from other notebook products on the market.

Within the gaming market, VR technology is an emerging application that has drawn significant development efforts from device vendors. VR, however, requires powerful PCs: the CPU must have the processing power of a recent Intel Core i5 or above, the graphic card must have the same or better specs as NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 and the minimum RAM is 8GB. To make purchases easier and avoid device incompatibility, device manufacturers have introduced their hardware certifications for PCs that support VR. 

Besides initiatives from end device vendors HTC and Oculus, chip makers NVIDIA and Intel have respectively announced “GeForce GTX VR Ready” and “Intel’s VR Ready” certification plans as well. These different standards on supporting hardware specs reflect the growing rivalry among competitors for the influence over the development of the VR market.

TrendForce notes that these certification programs help accelerate the penetration of VR-capable machines in the PC market. Gaming PCs will therefore see further specs upgrades that can lead to higher prices.