With HTC beginning to take pre-orders for the SteamVR-powered Vive headset in just one week, you may well be wondering if your PC tower is up for running high-end VR without any distracting lag. Worry not: Valve has just released a SteamVR Performance Test Tool to determine whether you are technologically ready to shell out $799 for an HTC Vive

Unlike Oculus' own Rift Compatibility Tool, which just seems to check your PC parts against a list without actually running a diagnostic, Valve's tool takes a few minutes to run through a small, non-interactive animation of a GLaDOS robot repair facility. The goal is to "determine whether your system is capable of running VR content at 90fps and whether VR content can tune the visual fidelity up to the recommended level," according to a Valve blog post.

Afterwards, the tool gives an average fidelity rating (on a numerical and Low/Medium/High/Very High scale). It also tells you what percentage of tested frames dipped below the recommended 90 fps for a smooth VR experience and whether any of those frames were bound by the CPU, rather than the GPU. The tool does warn that "the varying CPU cost of positional tracking and processing-intensive applications" could mean actual software runs worse than the test would suggest and warns that it doesn't test for available USB slots either.

While Oculus announced the recommended specs needed to power its Rift headset months ago, Valve doesn't seem to have publicly listed what hardware is generally needed to reach the "Capable" and "Ready" levels in its own test. Then again, the test tool itself recommends an Intel i5-4590, a GTX970 (or equivalent), and just 4MB(?!) of RAM... so make of that what you will.

We've listed the reported test results for a few Ars staffer Windows machines below to give you some idea of the ranges for various reported VR performance levels. If a few Arsians can share their test results in the comments, I'm sure we'll have a good idea of the cutoffs crowdsourced in no time.