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posted by takyon on Saturday May 16 2015, @08:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the 90-to-120-fps-gpu-sales-trick dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Hairyfeet on Sunday May 17 2015, @05:32PM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Sunday May 17 2015, @05:32PM (#184096) Journal

    Its also for technical reasons, I mean just look at the hardware requirements. Lets face it guys, Linux has NEVER EVER been great when it comes to GPU support, this is why Firefox even goes so far as to disable hardware acceleration [osnews.com], something Windows has had since Vista.

    Linux fans can scream and curse me all they want (I wish they'd scream and curse at Torvalds and friends, maybe shit would improve) but the reason the "Hairyfeet Challenge" has been able to stand for 8 years without a single "consumer friendly" distro passing is because the driver model just sucks and Torvalds simply will not accept that "let the kernel devs handle it" may have worked in 1993, when all the Linux drivers could fit on a single floppy, just does not work when we are talking about several tens of thousands of drivers for hardware of ever increasing complexity. Hell look at how long its taken for the devs working on the AMD FOSS drivers to get where they are and they had AMD hand them the docs AND hire extra devs familiar with the hardware to work on the project!

    Will Valve change things with SteamOS? You can dream if you want but I personally doubt it, I still say the reasons that Newell created it for, a hedge in case the Windows market took off or if MSFT tried to lock down third parties services, left the building with the Ballmernator. I think he'll keep it going for another year or so as a bargaining chip but its pretty obvious that the Windows market at best is gonna be the kind of "Candy Crush/Bubble Witch" ultra mainstream casual market which Steam simply does not appeal to and the masses aren't gonna want SteamOS because your top 25 games? They just won't run on it. that isn't even touching on the fact that Steam is DRM and a large vocal minority of Linux faithful look at DRM as desirable as the black death.

    But as long as Torvalds and friends refuses to come into this century and give Linux a driver subsystem that you can actually update/upgrade without the GPU manufacturers having to crank out a new driver with each patch or some kernel dev having to somehow magically come up with the time to go through a decade plus worth of GPU drivers to fix 'em? Then your high end graphics requiring games and gear just ain't coming there, sorry. Hell look at what SteamOS carries now, its nearly all indie games that would run on an Intel Atom netbook, you just don't see graphical powerhouses coming to Linux, its just not able to handle it.

    --
    ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
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