The HTC Vive Pro arrives in April for $799, current Vive drops to $499

HTC announced today that the Vive Pro HMD, with an increased resolution of 2880x1600 and built-in headphones, will cost $799 ($1,199 in Australia), the same price the Vive launched for in 2016. Pre-orders begin today, and shipping of the new headset will begin on April 5. Orders received before June 3 will include a six-month trial for Viveport, which gives you five games of your choice every month.

Note that the $799 is for the Vive Pro HMD headset and does not include base stations or controllers. For previous customers who already own that equipment, the Vive Pro will work with the base stations and controllers you already have. First-time buyers of the Pro will have to purchase them separately. A complete Vive Pro kit will be announced at a future date.

"The Vive Pro comes with dual-OLED displays," reads the press release from HTC, "making for a crisper image resolution of 2880 x 1600 combined, a 78% increase in resolution over the current Vive HMD. In addition to visuals, Vive Pro also features integrated, high-performance headphones with a built-in amplifier that creates a heightened sense of presence and sound through noise cancellation capabilities."

We'll be testing the Vive Pro over the next few weeks—we already have some impressions of when we saw it in January—and will post our thoughts on the new headset in the near future.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.