Photo: Oculus

Facebook's (META 0.84%) Oculus Rift will launch in the first quarter of 2016.

The headset could be the first true, mass-market virtual reality solution, offering consumers a chance to experience entertainment on an entirely new level. While the Oculus Rift will initially be aimed at video game enthusiasts, it could eventually find a much larger audience. Business Insider Intelligence believes that more than 26 million virtual reality headsets will be sold in 2020, giving the industry a compound annual growth rate of around 100%.

Investors looking to get exposure to the Oculus Rift may be tempted to buy shares of Facebook. Although a successful launch should benefit the social network, Facebook's sheer size ensures that Oculus Rift will remain a relatively tiny portion of Facebook's total business, at least for the foreseeable future. Two other companies stand to gain much more.

A new PC accessory
Unlike many other consumer electronics, the Oculus Rift is not self-contained, but rather, an accessory. In order to use it, buyers will need to plug it into a PC -- and a fairly powerful PC at that. Ahead of the Oculus Rift's launch, Facebook has offered up the minimum system requirements necessary to take advantage of the headset.

Oculus Rift users will need a Windows PC equipped with, at the very minimum, an Intel i5-4590 processor and 8GB of RAM. That's a hurdle, but not an overly daunting one -- most mid-level desktops, like the $800 Dell Inspiron, make the cut. The real barrier comes from the need for a relatively high-end, discrete video card. Oculus Rift users will need at least an Nvidia (NVDA -3.00%) GTX 970 or an AMD (AMD -4.76%) R9 290.

Pricing on components varies, and in general, the cost of PC parts drops over time, but both video cards currently retail for around $300.

How AMD and NVIDIA could benefit
That sounds like a huge hurdle, and it could prevent rapid adoption. But millions of PC gamers already spend hundreds of dollars on discrete desktop graphics cards -- indeed, it's a major part of both AMD and NVIDIA's business.

NVIDIA has started to wade into other markets, including autonomous vehicles and drones, but it continues to derive almost all of its revenue from GPUs. Last quarter, NVIDIA's GPU business generated nearly 82% of its revenue. Its GPU-related revenue rose 5% on an annual basis, which NVIDIA attributed to increased demand from PC gamers. During its subsequent earnings call, NVIDIA's CFO said that gaming-related revenue totaled $587 million, or about 62% of its total graphics revenue.

NVIDIA is the market leader when it comes to discrete graphics cards, capturing the vast majority of sales. According to John Peddie Research, NVIDIA's discrete cards accounted for a massive 77.5% share of the market in the first quarter, up from around 65% in the fourth quarter of 2013.

AMD lags NVIDIA in terms of market share, but it's the only other firm offering discrete graphics cards. AMD represented the remaining 22.5% of the market last quarter. Unfortunately, AMD does not break out its discrete graphics business as a separate segment, instead lumping it in with its traditional PC processors. This combined segment -- AMD's Computing and Graphics -- generated just more than 50% of AMD's revenue last quarter, though it operated at a loss.

Earlier this month AMD announced a slew of new graphics cards, including the high-end R9 Fury X. At $649, it's expensive, but benchmark tests suggest that it's performance is better than NVIDIA's similarly priced GTX 980 Ti. AMD investors have to contend with the company's increasingly precarious position in the traditional processor market, but rising demand for its graphics cards could provide some upside.

Of course, that's assuming that the Oculus Rift is a hit. Admittedly, virtually reality is in its infancy, and the market remains unproven. But if the device catches on, the demand for high-end graphics cards should rise, boosting both AMD and NVIDIA's bottom lines.