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Oculus Founder: Rift Will Come To Mac If Apple "Ever Releases a Good Computer" (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It's been almost a year now since Oculus announced that the consumer version of the Rift virtual-reality headset would only support Windows PCs at launch -- a turnaround from development kits that worked fine on Mac and Linux boxes. Now, according to Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, it "is up to Apple" to change that state of affairs. Specifically, "if they ever release a good computer, we will do it," he told Shacknews recently. Basically, Luckey continued, even the highest-end Mac you can buy would not provide an enjoyable experience on the final Rift hardware, which is significantly more powerful than early development kits. "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn't prioritize high-end GPUs," he said. "You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top-of-the-line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn't match our recommended specs."
Not really. The reason why the spendiest MacPro doesn't support OR is all in the GPU, the FirePro D700 isn't designed to achieve high framerates in games.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
If a high end Mac won't support it. You will need a higher end PC which will be beyond most people's budgets.
Not even slightly. Because iMacs have basically shit graphics and aren't upgradeable due to being all in one.
And the mac pros have specialist workstation graphics cards certified for CAD etc; which are extremely expensive, and very good for CAD, but not so great for games; and they also ship with Xeons etc which push the price way up.
Meanwhile a basic PC tower with a decent i5/i7 and a highend video card can be had for $1500 or less.
Merriam-Webster begs to differ:
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
I haven't seen a system crash since Windows XP myself, I suspect most Windows crashes these days are more due to cheap flaky hardware and drivers as opposed to the OS.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
High end Macs come with Work Station graphics cards. They're not meant for rendering games in realtime, they're meant for running Maya/Photoshop (think editing a 12k image), Autocad etc, etc. They can run games, just not very well.
The rest of Apple's range ships with Intel Graphics, which they swapped back to as soon as they were good enough to do 4k+ light 3D (think Bioshock Infinite levels).
Apple can sell you a $2000 laptop with $400 worth of hardware. There's no way they're going to bite into that profit margin for the sake of a few early adopters and drop $300 worth of graphics in there. They only do that on the workstation because the computers would be basically worthless otherwise, and there they crank the price up to 6k to compensate...
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That's disingenuous. That one "chip" can be configured at purchase to be a 4, 6, 8, or 12-core Xeon. The only problem is their choice of workstation GPUs. I hope they offer Nvidia Pascal GPUs in the near future. Should be low power enough for their quiet cooling solution.
Posting AC, just because. I bought a 2015 MBP... guess what, when doing anything serious with it, it overheats, and sometimes it might throttle back, othertimes, it just thermal-halts, or gives the pinwheel of death. I've had to grab an app someone wrote on GitHub to scale back my stuff when the thermal pressure of the Mac went above a certain level. Memory pressure, same... Run too much stuff, and Macs don't swap gracefully... they thrash, pretty much requiring a force-off with the power button. Genius support can't really do much because all fans are within parameters, and thermal shutdowns leave zero in the way of logs. Yes, I've done OS reloads, even booting the box from a Linux USB flash drive, typing in "blkdiscard -v /dev/sda" to ensure that the flash drive is absolutely clean, then reloading from that.
The ironic thing... my old MBP from ages ago, which is the same size... just keeps on ticking. It gets a new OS every year, but I've never had it just thermal suicide.
Now, lets look at Apple's other offerings.
The Mac Mini. What a joke. It was a four core machine until the last refresh two years ago... now it sports two cores + HT, slower, and less upgradable. Desperately needs some love.
The Mac Pro. The old Mac Pros used to have the ability to use RAID. This one? One SSD, and that's it? For a computer that will cost you $4000 for something with reasonable specs, this is just unacceptable. It also is a bitch to rack, requiring a third party kit.
The 2015 MacBook. WTF? These specs are good for a 2010 laptop, but with one expansion slot (which is used for power), and nothing else, this may be a great thing for a college students to write papers on, but this isn't a serious machine.
The iMac. It drives one screen OK... but most people run two or three heads these days, if only to play a game on one screen or VM while doing something on the other. Try that with an iMac, and you have a nice slideshow. Apple seems to use the absolute minimum it takes to drive a machine, GPU-wise.
Don't forget repairability. There isn't any.
Yes, Apple makes their money on the iPhone, but they really should not neglect their other product lines, and from what I've been seeing the past few years, the Mac offerings have been becoming more of toys at best, expensive paperweights at worst.
Maybe Apple just should get off their ass and make the old school Mac Pros, or just make toys and spin off the Mac line to another company that can focus on making a quality product.
Unfortunately, the desktop CPU's do not support multiple CPU configurations, so you either have a single desktop i7 or you have a multi xeon CPU.
The article is correct though about the choice of graphics hardware, which is unfortunately a limitation of their current hardware offerings.
False. Eons use exactly the same architecture as desktop CPUs, they just have additional support for (originally SMP), and more recently, NUMA. A 12 core Xeon is directly equivalent to a modern 4 core i7, just with 3 times as many cores.
My mind was blown at how places are actually turning to Linux for desktops. My last place I worked at used Ubuntu. My current place, I'm using RHEL. Outlook? In a VM accessed via RDP, or just using OWA outright.
Here is what a Linux desktop gives you:
1: Ease of reimaging... PXE boot, kickstart... done. If LDAP is used for authorization, that can be tossed in the .ks file. Same with ansible [1].
2: No telemetry data sucked to MS, no privacy invasions, no scanning of documents. Stuff stays put on Linux.
3: Fewer reboots needed... and when they are needed, it is truly something that needs a reboot, like the kernel. Most stuff can be updated, daemon restarted, done.
4: Backups are easier. Pick your poison, obnam, zbackup, bup, borgbackup, etc.
5: No internal activation servers needed. No vendor true-ups. No service audits.
6: Linux encryption can be done on the disk, homedir level, or both.
7: Even though GUIs on Linux are horri-bad when it comes to memory footprints, you can find something that isn't too bad. KDE is relatively fast, and items like kwrite are lightweight and support the markdown format popular with Git.
8: Security patches are extremely fast. A "yum update" or an "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" will fix issues. Windows and OS X users usually have to wait weeks for those to be dealt with.
9: It is trivial with a CM tool to audit/manage a large amount of desktops. SSH bug? ansible all -a "yum -y upgrade openssh". Want to make sure all systems are patched? ansible all -a "rpm -qa|grep openssh". What a spreadsheet? CM tool + jinja.
If you are a glutton for pain and punishment, there is always Katello which has a warm fuzzy web interface to check machines' patch levels. However, it is VERY brittle and has so many moving parts (puppet, pulp, celery, foreman, mongodb, mysql, and shitloads of more stuff) that it is a nice toy, but falls flat on its face if you actually try to get it to do anything.
Of course, Linux isn't for everyone. Larger enterprises live and die on GPOs. But, it is something that more companies are using because of the privacy invasions and the ever-increasing licensing costs from MS.
[1]: Yes, puppet and chef are cool... but ansible takes the cake for needing nothing but python libraries on the client side to be operable and working, and puppet has a shitload of moving parts, which is just asking for security issues down the road. Ansible? If SSH is broken, everyone is fscked anyway.
"That one "chip" can be configured at purchase to be a 4, 6, 8, or 12-core Xeon."
That's disingenuous too, right the fuck back at you, when all of those same Xeons come with the same crippled amount of PCI-E lanes *AND* have an inherent architectural limitation that totally fucks the system over trying to do more than 2CPU/2GPU configurations.
Try again when you actually have to deal with the processor and architectural errata on a daily basis, instead of Macshilling, eh?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
There isn't a single Mac that is capable, no matter how much money you throw at Apple. Even if you could throw, say a Geforce GTX980ti in one, the drivers don't exist. Apple maintains complete driver control on their platform, and even when they DID provide options that included then-equivalent hardware, the performance was abysmal.
[looks at computer. Yep, it still exists. Phew!]
simon% system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType
Graphics/Displays:
Intel HD Graphics 4000:
Chipset Model: Intel HD Graphics 4000
Type: GPU
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Dynamic, Max): 1536 MB
Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
Device ID: 0x0166
Revision ID: 0x0009
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti:
Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x8
VRAM (Total): 6143 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x17c8
Revision ID: 0x00a1
ROM Revision: VBIOS 84.00.36.00.90
Displays:
Cinema HD:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 2560 x 1600
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Display Serial Number: CY7350KMXMP
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Rotation: Supported
Cinema HD Display:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1200 x 1920
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Rotation: 270
Cinema HD Display:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1200 x 1920
Pixel Depth: 30-Bit Color (ARGB2101010)
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Rotation: 270
You were saying ?
Performance seems pretty darn good to me. This is a Mac mini, by the way. It's driving 2x23" monitors (sideways on, for coding on) and one 30" monitor (main display, in the c
Physicists get Hadrons!
And wireless, and touch-pads, and extra keyboard functions, and back-lighting controls, and more...
Unless I'm reading you wrong and your post is sarcasm then I'm gonna have to guess you're either really new to Linux or don't actually use Linux. Visit any of the forums, visit any of the support pages. There are hardware support issues aplenty. You might say the pages abound with hardware support issues.
Visit AskUbuntu, the Linux Mint forum, Linux Questions, Arch forums, etc etc etc... Subscribe to the mailing lists, read their archives, etc...
No, there are plenty of issues with hardware and Linux. It's usually resolvable but the problems do exist. I say this as a Linux user. It's not like I'm just making it up.
At the same time, today, I hardly ever have hardware issues that I can't just figure out with a quick Google. More often than not, I don't have any hardware issues at all. That's a matter of selecting certain components and being willing to accept that things like sleep don't work when I close my laptop lid. I didn't really like (or use) that feature anyhow so it's no big deal to me.
I don't need to use the buttons on the keyboard to control the monitor's brightness. If it doesn't work and I need it then I'll just find the command, alias it, and make adjustments via the terminal.
I'm not a gamer, I don't care if I have the most FPS. I'll just use the open source drivers for my GPU - thanks. I don't need the proprietary stuff because the most graphics intensive thing I'm going to do is watch a documentary. Maybe, just maybe, I might open GIMP. Probably not though - I'm good for stick figures.
I don't worry about one of those pen and tablet things to draw on. I've never actually found a printer that didn't work, eventually. I don't buy the three-in-one nor do I print things that need exact colors for the purpose of photography. So, I'm good there too.
I've come across a few distros that, for whatever reason, don't like certain hardware - that's okay, I'm flexible. I'll find another OS on there. Back home I have, for example, one particular desktop (not much different from another - with the exact same GPU) that doesn't like Mint. For some reason, the screen tears a couple of times and it drops me into TTY. To top it off, it won't restart Xorg or whatever it was. So, that one went into the bit bucket and I tossed another distro on and, sure enough, it was good to go.
Then, I could go back through my own history... The above is just today, right now, that I can think of - and limited by how much effort I'm willing to put into thought. I've seen loads of complaints. I don't really have any problems because I'm not actually usually impacted by it. It's just that it would be dishonest to say that Linux doesn't have some device driver shortcomings. I've even come across a USB drive that would not, for the life of me, work with any of the distros that I had installed - while it worked fine in any non-Linux OS that I had access to, as well as working just fine with BSD. (It was some iOmega device, as I recall.)
It's not as bad as it used to be. Not at all. It is usually something that can be fixed but it's not always peachy and fine right from the go. If you've never had any "bigger hardware support issues" with Linux then perhaps you're fairly new to the OS or you're just not trying hard enough. Then again, it might be the other way around and you're a true guru who doesn't have problems because you're really, really good at writing your own drivers or the likes.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You could do that (legally*) on a PC if Apple would allow it. And you could build a more capable system than Apple even offers, on top of that; you could literally run all 3 OSes at once (two would have to be virtualized, but I think you'd be fine with that) with their own dedicated displays and input devices, effectively actually running 3 computers in a single machine. You literally can't do that on a Mac, because OSX doesn't support running a proper hypervisor, nor running under one (legally*).
There is literally no technical reason why OSX can't run on non-Apple hardware, as made evident by the fact that people do it all the time. There is no special hardware that allows OSX to run, the roadblock is literally a system service called DSMOS (Don't Steal MacOS), which checks the system ID and hangs the boot process if it ID is not that of an Apple machine; the workaround is to either use a UEFI module to change the reported system ID or replace the DSMOS binary with one that simply exits with the proper code. Then, assuming you've got OSX-compatible drivers (often recompiled open source drivers "borrowed" from another BSD distro), you've got a working PC running OSX.
* You can actually do that on a PC, just not legally, and it's a bit of a hack and somewhat unstable due to having to modify system components to not complain about the lack of an Apple-blessed system ID and, often, the shoehorning of FreeBSD drivers for hardware that isn't officially supported by OSX.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.