SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
It's been almost a year now since Oculus announced that the consumer version of the Rift virtual reality headset would only support Windows PCs at launch—a turnaround from development kits that worked fine on Mac and Linux boxes. Now, according to Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, it "is up to Apple" to change that state of affairs. Specifically, "if they ever release a good computer, we will do it," he told Shacknews recently.
Basically, Luckey continued, even the highest-end Mac you can buy would not provide an enjoyable experience on the final Rift hardware, which is significantly more powerful than early development kits. "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn't prioritize high-end GPUs," he said. "You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top-of-the-line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn't match our recommended specs."
"So if they prioritize higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, we'd love to support Mac. But right now, there's just not a single machine out there that supports it," he added. "Even if we can support on the software side, there's just no audience that could run the vast majority of software on it."
Source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/oculus-founder-rift-will-come-to-mac-if-apple-ever-release-a-good-computer/.
See also: Shacknews blog.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by CHK6 on Friday March 04 2016, @03:57PM
I think Luckey has a serious problem on his hands. If a $6K Mac Pro with a $3K AMD FirePro D700 video card cannot power his device to a usable state, then I think Luckey's engineering team is doing it wrong. It's a poor excuse to blame it on Apple. Maybe, just maybe his engineers aren't up to the challenge.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Friday March 04 2016, @05:04PM
If a $6K Mac Pro with a $3K AMD FirePro D700 video card cannot power his device to a usable state
Whether or not you think its "a good computer", the $6K Mac Pro was never intended to be a gaming machine - its a video editing/pro graphics workstation. The dual AMD FirePro D700 video cards aren't 'dual' in the sense of the SLI or Crossfire setup you'll find on gaming PCs, they're optimised for workstation use, not games and they're there as much for GPU-based computation (with OpenCL) as for actual graphics. The money goes on things like Xeon CPUs, ECC RAM, loadsa multi-threading and high-tech cooling for reliability on long render jobs rather than raw grunt.
Plug a FirePro or NVidia Quadro workstation card into your PC and, whatever the gaming performance, a 'consumer' gaming-oriented GPU will smoke it in terms of bangs-per-buck.
"Macs aren't the best computers for serious gaming" is hardly a revelation. Its never been a priority. Apple has a gaming platform: its called the iPhone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @06:14PM
"Apple has a gaming platform: its called the iPhone."
Well played! You owe me a bottle of Windex to get the coffee I just spat on my monitor cleaned up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by damnbunni on Friday March 04 2016, @05:09PM
The D700 simply isn't a good card for gaming. That's not what it's meant for; its strengths lie elsewhere.
It doesn't help that OSX handles 'oh, I have two GPUs!' by dedicating one for compute and one for display. It's possible to override that, but it has to be done on a per-game basis, in the game engine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @05:41PM
Do you know the difference between the following apparently similar looking words?
*priceless
*worthless
There's a bridge I'd like to sell ya...