The Oculus Rift will require Windows at launch
Oculus has revealed the PC specs they recommend in order to run their consumer version of the Oculus Rift, and for the moment, it will be a Window-only device.“Presence is the first level of magic for great VR experiences: the unmistakable feeling that you’ve been teleported somewhere new,” said the company. “Comfortable, sustained presence requires a combination of the proper VR hardware, the right content, and an appropriate system.”
Oculus has revealed the PC specs they recommend in order to run their consumer version of the Oculus Rift, and for the moment, it will be a Window-only device.
“Presence is the first level of magic for great VR experiences: the unmistakable feeling that you’ve been teleported somewhere new,” said the company. “Comfortable, sustained presence requires a combination of the proper VR hardware, the right content, and an appropriate system.”
The recommended specs:
◆ NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
◆ Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
◆ 8GB+ RAM
◆ Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
◆ 2x USB 3.0 ports
◆ Windows 7 SP1 or newer
“The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration,” said the company. “Ultimately, we believe this will be fundamental to VR’s success, as developers can optimize and tune their game for a known specification, consistently achieving presence and simplifying development.”
In a different blog post, Atman Binstock, the chief architect of Oculus, explained why they need that caliber of gear.
“There are three key VR graphics challenges to note: raw rendering costs, real-time performance, and latency,” he wrote. “On the raw rendering costs: a traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second.
“In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second.
“This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering.”
Binstock also explained why the Oculus Rift will be Windows-only. “Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows,” he wrote. “We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux, but we don’t have a timeline.”