Oculus Rift Tech Specs Revealed As Mac And Linux Versions Delayed
The Oculus Rift tech specs have been revealed ahead of its official consumer launch date next year. Virtual Reality has been set to make a second attempt at integration with our digital entertainment for several years now, and we finally have a release window in 2016 from the company that Facebook bought. The tech specs of Oculus Rift give developers and consumers a requirement that ensures a certain level of parity. According to Atman Linstock from Oculus Rift, the tech specs “ensure that developers can optimize for a known hardware configuration, which ensures a better player experience of comfortable sustained presence.”
Powering the Rift was the title of the blog post over at the Oculus website, which details the tech specs required from gamers who wish to take the plunge into VR. The Oculus Rift tech specs are not cheap and, as expected, will require some serious muscle under the hood as well as some greenbacks from its early adopters. The first, and most crucial component, is the video card, which will handle the bulk of the processing, and Oculus is recommending the NVIDIA GTX 970 or the AMD 290. The current price for the NVIDIA GTX 970 is $350 on NewEgg. The recommended CPU is the Intel i5 — 4590 Haswell chip, which retails at $199 also at NewEgg. The gamer who is building their rig from scratch will also have to take into consideration the cost of RAM, a motherboard with at least 2 USB 3.0 ports, Windows 7 SP1, HDMI 1.3, and the tower case itself, among other elements — not to mention the cost of the Oculus Rift itself, which has yet to be announced.
Gamers who may be looking at the Oculus Rift tech specs and wondering why all this power is needed should remember that the Rift is showing two distinct images at a resolution of 2160 x 1200 at a 90Hz refresh rate, per eye. If you are using a 1080p monitor on your desktop computer, you are essentially adding two monitors at the same resolution, in terms of required horsepower. If your computer is not up to the task, it will drop frames, which can result in “discomfort” for VR users. This “discomfort” usually manifests as nausea and other less-than-appealing side effects when you are tricking your visual senses.
The interesting thing is that the specs will be held for the lifetime of the Rift. Technology loves to race ahead where angels (and wallets) fear to tread. Oculus may very well last a long time, half a decade perhaps, before something akin to the Oculus Rift 2 will be announced to take advantage of the inevitable faster GPUs, CPUs, and other elements that are sure to become standard as the years go on. Laptops, as TechCrunchnoted, are pretty much incompatible with the Oculus Rift in their current form. As technology progresses, the laptop will likely be able to handle the Rift, but make sure that you have your power adapter handy if you do elect to use it.
Gamers who call the Mac or Linux environments their home for gaming will be sad to hear that the development of Oculus Rift has been put on hold. This is likely due to pressure to deliver a product to the consumer, as Sony’s Morpheus will be out this year and Samsung’s budget VR experience on the Samsung Galaxy phones is already here, as the Inquisitr has covered previously.
[Image Source: Oculus Rift]
