Oculus Rift Requires Hefty PC, Windows OS

With an official release date for the customer version of Oculus Rift a little less than a year away (the first quarter of 2016) things have started to pick up over at Oculus, the company behind the device. Customers and developers alike are chomping at the bit to learn more about the latest, greatest PC cash sink, but they might regret having asked. In a lengthy post by Chief Architect at Oculus Atman Binstock, Oculus revealed recently that not only will the Oculus require a pretty powerful PC to work, it will also be incompatible with both OS X and Linux operating systems.

“The Rift is specifically designed to deliver comfortable, sustained presence – a “conversion on contact” experience that can instantly transform the way people think about virtual reality. As a VR device, the Rift will be capable of delivering comfortable presence for nearly everyone. However, this requires the entire system working well.”

And a system working well ain’t cheap. The post itself has all the insight and reasoning, which is a good read if you’re into that kind of thing, but the TL;DR version is this: at a bare minimum, you need Windows 7 SP1 or newer, 2x USB 3.0 ports, and a HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture. But for the “full Oculus Rift Experience”, you’ll need NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater, Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater, plus 8GB+ of RAM.

And, of course, you can’t have anything with Linux or OS X.

“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. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.”

I don’t want to be the guy saying “everything’s gone downhill since the Oculus Rift was bought out by Facebook!”, but that sure seems to be around the time when the hype for this particular piece of hardware started diminishing. No one can deny that a great VR experience will radically change the gaming world, but I think there’s a healthy amount of doubt now on if the Oculus Rift will be the VR experience that’s going to accomplish that. They ain’t the only horse in the race, after all.

Still. When it comes down to it, most serious gamers use a Windows OS anyway. Exclusionary or not, you have to admit it is the practical OS to design around.