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Oculus Rift Hardware Requirements Revealed, Linux and OS X Development Halted
An anonymous reader writes: Oculus has selected the baseline hardware requirements for running their Rift virtual reality headset. To no one's surprise, they're fairly steep: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater, Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater, and 8GB+ RAM. It will also require at least two USB 3.0 ports and "HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture."
Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock explains: "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." He also points out that PC graphics can afford a fluctuating frame rate — it doesn't matter too much if it bounces between 30-60fps. The Rift has no such luxury, however.
The last requirement is more onerous: WIndows 7 SP1 or newer. Binstock says their development for OS X and Linux has been "paused" so they can focus on delivering content for Windows. They have no timeline for going back to the less popular platforms.
Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock explains: "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." He also points out that PC graphics can afford a fluctuating frame rate — it doesn't matter too much if it bounces between 30-60fps. The Rift has no such luxury, however.
The last requirement is more onerous: WIndows 7 SP1 or newer. Binstock says their development for OS X and Linux has been "paused" so they can focus on delivering content for Windows. They have no timeline for going back to the less popular platforms.
Wait for Valve to get interested. Then both Mac and Linux support issues will be covered (at least somewhat).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The Kickstarter was for the DK1, which was shipped.
But this is still massively fucked up. The HTC headset Valve is launching sounds much better.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Right now the "consumer Macs" don't have the GPU power (the Mac Pro does, but it's a sliver of their sales), and even if they did, Apple doesn't focus on the drivers in the way that happens on Windows - while it's possible for third party vendors to release drivers (Nvidia does it, for example), it's just not common - the vast majority of Mac users are running with the driver that ships with the OS and it doesn't get updated often.
They have made some strides forward in shipping decent GPU hardware, but the software is still somewhat lacking for heavy 3D lifting.
No it wont, unless you're prone top motion sickness, in which case VR is not for you.
Yeah right, sure. That's why oculus games' developers themselves are complaining about VR sickness:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
Let's put this stupid never ending meme to rest, shall we?
The 9500 Kickstarter backers got their DK1 for their money. Including me. I was one of the first ones. They have delivered what they have promised in the campaign, nothing less, nothing more.
Or do you really think that the development beyond the DK1 and the massive hiring that included people like Abrash and Carmack that has brought Oculus from a 3 person startup to a large company acquired by Facebook was actually financed by the Kickstarter money? You need to get real, those Kickstarter 2.5 millions were long gone by then. Yes, the Kickstarter got it off the ground but everything else was paid by venture capital - and Facebook. So the Kickstarter backers really don't have any reason to not be happy about what became of their money nor does Oculus have anything to report to them anymore.
Now whether the direction in which Oculus is going meshes with the ideals about "democratization of VR", cheap VR that everyone could enjoy etc. that is another discussion. Personally, I am not happy with what they are doing, because instead of making the VR cheap and easily accessible it is going to be a toy for the rich kids only. The minimal PC requirements are actually the least of the issues, even though it is something that the lay person is most likely to deal with.
The much worse problem is that their SDK is becoming more and more proprietary, closed binary blob that requires your 3D engine to pretty much build everything around it, otherwise it is a nightmare to integrate. It is pretty telling that even Unreal Engine 4 *still* doesn't have a good DK2 integration, year after DK2 is out - it is that complex and that intrusive to do and their heavily threaded and pipelined engine is not a good fit for the expectations the SDK has. I am afraid that with these crazy requirements the adoption by actual content producers - game studios, application developers, etc. is going to be minimal.
The massive effort required to re-engineer the games (both the engines and to adapt the content) to support the Rift will not pay off when only a small niche will be able to actually use it. Heck, current games are barely able to consistently hit 60fps at 1080p, here we are asking double the resolution and, should we follow the recommendations from Oculus, we should be targeting 90-120fps. Good luck with that ... Either the Oculus games will have massively reduced visual quality compared to the "normal" versions or will require insane hardware. Most likely both. I just don't see the game studios jumping on this bandwagon on a massive scale. I am afraid that what will most likely happen is that it ends up as yet another obscure and poorly supported gizmo, like the Razer Hydra, things like the Vuzix glasses, various shutter 3D glasses that were sold for PC over the years etc. A pity and a massively wasted opportunity, really.
That they have stopped the Linux and Mac support - I think it was obvious that this was only a matter of time. The writing was on the wall ever since they have released the DK2 with the two-part SDK architecture (closed source binary blob runtime and an open library to talk to it). The Linux and Mac SDKs were much delayed and when the SDK finally arrived, it wasn't full featured - e.g. the "direct" mode has never arrived to Linux (even though it is possible to make something like that work and probably with fewer bugs and glitches than the horrid driver hack they do on Windows).
The Mac SDK may eventually come back, but I am not having much hope - most Mac users have laptops and most laptops with discrete GPUs actually don't render directly to the external output but into a framebuffer of the integrated ("slow") GPU which then sends the image out. Which is the architecture that is explicitly not supported by Oculus. The Linux SDK is very likely dead for good, even though they won't say so. It just doesn't make commercial sense to go there, the market is small. So it will be likely languishing in limbo forev
They probably don't want a sub-par version out there harming their reputation, so it would be most likely be a mistake to let the open source people run with it.
Actually, if they release ALL of the specs, it may be the other way. And that would be embarrassing as well.