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Baseline hardware requirements to run the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset have been determined. They recommend a NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or greater GPU, an Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater CPU, 8 GB RAM, 2x USB 3.0 ports and "HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297 MHz clock via a direct output architecture."
Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock explains: "On the raw rendering costs: a traditional [1920×1080] game at 60 Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90 Hz 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." He also points out that PC graphics can afford a fluctuating frame rate — it doesn't matter too much if it bounces between 30-60 fps. The Rift has no such luxury, however.
The last requirement is more onerous: Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 or newer. Binstock says their development for OS X and Linux has been "paused" so they can focus on delivering content for Microsoft Windows. They have no timeline for going back to the less popular platforms.
Are there any good alternatives that make use of a more open GPU (say, from Intel) from a VR manufacturer that provides proper support for FOSS platforms? Even better would be if the RAM requirement were lower, and something other than USB were used, perhaps Ethernet. And an alternative to HDMI that doesn't require a 10,000 US$ fee per manufacturer, regardless if you make 10 circuits or 100,000.
Tom's Hardware and Anandtech.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 17 2015, @01:16AM
Gee. Y'think?
At best, they are USA-centric--or were, several years ago.
Wikipedia's numbers for March put Windoze usage under 43 percent. [wikimedia.org]
Uruguay - 13.54 percent, Venezuela - 7.58 percent as examples of current numbers [mrpogson.com]
Linux usage a year and a half ago (world map) [muylinux.com]
Any estimates on how far Lose8, specifically, has shifted those toward darker colors in the ensuing year-plus?
This graph might be useful in your estimate. [mrpogson.com]
Whether these figures extrapolate to gaming is another issue, I will admit.
-- gewg_ (who is not a gamer at all)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 17 2015, @02:06AM
We're talking about advanced, cutting-edge graphics hardware that pushes even the best graphics workstations available today to their absolute limit, and even then they can't keep up.
Your stats include mobile devices that can barely power their own tiny screens.
If you even bothered to look at the breakdown of your stats, you'd see that the 15% "Linux" share is actually 14% Android!
Congratulations, you've just used the most irrelevant statistics here ever. The only things they prove is that you don't know what the hell you're talking about, and that Windows actually is the most widely used desktop OS by a huge margin.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Sunday May 17 2015, @12:11PM
Yeah, those really are crap figures in this context, web server traffic means absolutely nothing when looking at gaming market OS share. The Steam numbers previously posted are much more relevant.
In fact, these web traffic figures are just appallingly bad figures, period. iPad and iPhone OS are both listed in the mobile AND non-mobile categories, plus by far the most popular version listed is 1.X - yeah, right. Playstation and Wii are listed as mobile OSs. The Wikipedia app itself is listed as an OS.
tl;dr - Crap figures are crap.