My 40th birthday is coming up, and given its a bit of a mile stone we've saved up and I was originally thinking about getting an Oculus Rift. But given there are a number of other headset slated for release later this year I've decided to wait and see the next gen offerings.

So I've got £500 to spend on new PC parts

Current Spec is respectable

CPU : AMD FX 8350
RAM: 16Gig
GPU: R9 380 4G

Think of upgrading to a GTX 1070

ANy thoughts?

It depends on your screen (and what games you usually play of course). For 1080p & 1440p the card is great and it should play anything you throw at it maxed out but for 4K there are better (and more expensive) choices out there. What you should keep in mind, is that since you're going for VR sooner or later, check out if it actually is a good choice for that; you don't want to pay for a card today and next year be on the lookout for an upgrade because of the VR headset you bought.

I guess a stronger GPU is generally a good idea, if you're interested in any upcoming VR games and hardware. No idea which one to buy, or when -- I haven't kept track of new GPU releases lately -- but a GTX 1070 sounds solid to me. Have a nice Birthday, either way! Eat lots of cake. :)

Hey man I just did an upgrade myself. I bought the EVGA GTX 1070 SC and I have to say Im VERY pleased with it. I think a 1080 would be an overkill unless 4K is really your thing. Then again you'll get amazing results with a 1070 for 1440 and 4K as well... (go see some benchmarks).
IF you want to spare some money, buy a 1070 and spend the rest on a better CPU or PSU :)

This is the little beast I put together last week, let me know if you have any questions :D

Intel Core i5-7600K + Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo Cpu cooler
EVGA GTX 1070 SC
Crucial 8 GB DDR4-2133 Kit
mobo: Asrock Z270 Killer SLI Z270
PSU: Corsair RM750x

The rest of the rig might get an upgrade later in the year, depending on how good the Ryzen chips turn out.

I'm happy with my 27" 1080p screen, so no need for 4k gaming. That said, Current VR uses close to WQHD resolution which the gtx 1070 seems to handle fine.

Your existing GPU seems decent enough to me, but then I don't know what games you play nor their requirements either. Given the information you provided and my personal experience though I'd say that the CPU and RAM have a number of years left in them more than adequate for any existing or near future games and then some, but the GPU will always be the bottleneck so yeah - if I were to upgrade the system based on your specs I'd bump up the GPU as it'd be the bottleneck relative to the other components.

Most of my gaming is done through GoG, So cutting edge games are Witcher 3, Shadow Warrior 2 and so on. Which this rig plays very happily.

But going forward VR needs a whacking 90fps to avoid motion sickness.

The R9 380 will go to my daughter, (and her card to son, his card to another daughter and that card to child no4 ( No5 has a laptop..))

Hah hah, I guess it's some form of recycling. :)

And really, I thought the sweet spot was around 60fps? Current VR technology still seems to be quite barf-inducing, though. Supposedly it helps to stand up while playing.

Yeah, my GPU can't handle VR at all and barely handled The Witcher 3 but it did pull it off. :) I'm holding off on VR until it gets better, the hardware is cheaper, there are more titles supporting it properly and more standardization in the industry, and a handful of real VR games out there that I care about at decent prices, or alternatively a smaller number of titles that I am overwhelmingly excited about that I could justify the hardware expense on. So far to date there's only one VR game that I'm very highly interested in and it wont be released until later this year or perhaps next year at the earliest.

They need to sort out a better way to free-run in FPP games though before I can fully get on board, and the Virtuix Omni is too expensive to add on top of a VR headset and probably wont see too much application support I fear.

I think they aim for 90fps knowing that all games/systems get periods of lag, and shouldn't drop below 60fps.

Yeh. I tend to keep stuff running as long as it can. I've got the insides off a 10 year old Dell that are used to run our WoW server. It wasn't until 2015 when I finally purged my spares box of AGP motherboards and GFX cards

My understanding is that they use 90FPS because that close to the eye 60FPS isn't good enough and causes vertigo/headaches and other problems related to latency. I believe 75FPS is the minimum IIRC with 90FPS optimal. Not sure but I got the impression it doesn't even work on less than that, or so we're lead to believe anyway.

I've got a huge box in the basement jammed full of about 50 AGP cards hehehe. :)

Hopefully the next run of VR headset should start to mature the market.
I'm all for standardisation, as long as it is truly open does not require you to be bound to one service. PArt of the choice to go for the oculus is because the community have written a lot of wrappers around the hardware and software to open it up.

Had the oculus released at the original £300 price point, I'd already have one as I was hoping to be an early adopter on this.

I completely agree.

I was originally quite drawn to the Oculus Rift until Facebook acquired them. After reading about how Facebook's software monitors you and phones home with tracking data unnecessarily and essentially spys on you I stroked the Rift completely off my list. I haven't heard any similar news articles or any other major drawbacks to the Vive other than the price though so I'm now more fond of that hardware. Unfortunately even though there are apparently some universal VR APIs out there it appears that individual games are mostly targetting one or the other piece of hardware and not providing universal VR support so in addition to the current insanely unaffordable pricing, poor selection of game title support, extremely high system requirements in particular on the GPU side of things, and a growing divide on software support between the available platforms as a sort of Beta versus VHS type of war, there are a lot of reasons for the average consumer that isn't in a hurry to just sit back and wait it out.

I do have to also agree though that had the rift released at it's speculative $300 USD price point and the Facebook spyware issue not turned up I would have been very tempted to get one much sooner.

I'm deeply interested in the idea of VR and what it will bring to the table going forward not only for gaming, but other entertainment products, productivity products, training and simulation and other. Currently it seems like it is at the "black and white rounded CRT television" phase in its lifespan though. I'm going to wait for colour HDTV flatscreen phase if you follow... ;)