News Oculus VR reveals Rift hardware requirements

Well, if the Oculus Rift is for gaming it isn't a surpise. Can you even buy a Mac with a high end GPU?

 

The FirePro D700 is effectively a FirePro W9000 without ECC, which itself is the professional brand of the Radeon 7970 (same Tahiti XT core). A single card is not going to meet Oculus minimum spec. With two cards in Crossfire, if AMD enables Crossfire X rather than Crossfire Pro for OSX (currently it will only expose Crossfire X under Windows), and if AMD decide to support LiquidVR on older card generations and if they decide to extend LiquidVR to professional variants, then the dual D700 equipped Mac Pro might be up to spec depending on the scaling efficiency of LiquidVR.

 

It seems odd that he says "The recommended spec will stay constant over the lifetime of the Rift"
That seems like he's saying future games won't require better hardware, surely I've misunderstood.

 

Will wait for the Linux support then .

 

OK so I have an overclocked GTX 780 which is better than the standard 970.
Would this be good enough or are there specific technologies in the 970 that my 780 doesn't have?

 

Nope, the rift will be updated on a cycle to take on better technologies - higher res screens, better tracking, adding input devices. Obviously some of these things will require higher spec GPUs.

Nope, you're good to go.

 

I'm pretty sure it's a "brute force" requirement so you should be OK.

 

I would not expect the rift to increase resolution for years as any increase would be x2 and require a massive increase in GPU power. They are better off keeping required power so that the cost to power it will gradually decrease and in turn increase the potential market share. Imporving the tracking may or may no require an increase in CPU power but I would not expect it to be significant. How long before 24" 1080p or less is no longer the norm?

 

Those requirements seem pretty high, but, considering latency is crucial for these headsets (in order to reduce motion sickness) I think they make sense.

I was planning on getting the HTC Vive instead, but considering the direction of the Rift there's just no way I'm going to ever consider it now.

 

I'm curious, what did they use to benchmark the rift.

 

I agree, it doesn't seem to mean much considering it's games that dictate performance. Whilst a 290 or whatever is currently enough to generate the required frame rate, that surely won't always be the case as games become more demanding.

 

Demands on the hardware will change depending on the game will they not? Games like HL2 or Team Fortress will run well even on low end machines. Buying a new card just for the Rift seems odd given that new games might run well on older cards simply because they are not that demanding.

 

Firstly, you are wrong in saying that it would require a x2 increase. Is the 2160*1080 resolution of CV1 double the resolution of the DK2? Nope.

Secondly, Oculus have said that they expect mobile phone like upgrade cycles (~24 months). With that in mind you are saying that CV2 won’t have an improved screen, despite around two new generations of GPU being released in that time, as well as developments like interlacing that will hugely increase frames per second? There is absolutely no way the second generation of headset won’t have a higher res screen – if nothing else it would be an essential part of getting people to justify the upgrade.

Which direction? They way that they are only focusing on gamers, even going as far as dropping support for Linux and MacOS to focus on the core windows experience? Yeah, that’s annoying.

 

I'm not saying the screen wouldn't improve, just that a resolution increase is not necissary for that improvemenet. As for the 2x, I mistakenly thought that it had one screen for each eye.

 

OR was partially so successful because it was an independent project focused on gamers for Windows, Mac, and Linux as well as being good with mid-range systems. It was also a decent price (though I'm not sure what the final price will be). Then Facebook comes along, buys it out for a ridiculous amount of money and changes the roadmap regardless of the obligations toward the backers. Personally, I see absolutely no excuse that they can't focus on Mac and Linux. The original development team was able to and didn't have infinite cash to spend. And even though I have a system capable of using the Rift, I think they're spec demands are a little unrealisticall high. The Rift was, in my opinion, supposed to be widely available, not just an enthusiast product.

 

I think that anyone who expected the Rift to need anything less than a 970 has been dreaming. We are talking about dual 1920x1080 screens at a 75Hz frame rate --most current 3D games are going to need a bit of pixel push for that to happen.

 

Actually it's dual 1920x1200. But anyway, it hasn't always been that way. The DK2 is a single 1920x1080 screen at 60Hz, and it didn't appear the developers had any immediate plans on improving that up until competition showed up. In fact I didn't know they were planning on doing that until yesterday.

 

I'm confused. Isn't the CV1 resolution 2160x1200 @ 90Hz, split between both eyes?