As promised Oculus VR is revealing more details about its consumer virtual reality system. Today the company revealed which PC consumers need to run VR apps.
Oculus VR unveiled today the recommended PC specifications for the Rift Virtual Reality system schedule for release in Q1 2016.
For the full Rift experience, Oculus VR recommends the following system:
- 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
Atman Binstock, Chief Architect at Oculus says: “Given the challenges around VR graphics performance, the Rift will have a recommended specification to ensure that developers can optimize for a known hardware configuration, which ensures a better player experience of comfortable sustained presence. The recommended PC specification is an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290, Intel i5-4590, and 8GB RAM. This configuration will be held for the lifetime of the Rift and should drop in price over time.”
VR requires a lot of rendering power. This is why the system needs at least a NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290 GPU. Binstock says 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.”
A NVIDIA GTX 970 card costs about $330. A complete PC with the specifications above runs for about $800 to $900. Oculus VR has still not revealed what the Rift will sell for.
The Oculus Rift VR system will be first delivered on Windows OS. Binstock said that 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. The company wants to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.
This would be normal for a startup. Focus is essential to manage resources and get to market. Oculus VR is though owned by Facebook and they could through more resources at the company to also develop Linux and OS X versions at the same time.
Consumers can pre-order the Oculus Rift virtual reality system later this year and expect shipment in Q1 of 2016. Read more at: http://tr.im/OLFi0
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