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Oculus Founder: Rift will come to Mac if Apple “ever releases a good computer”

posted by cmn32480 on Friday March 04 2016, @02:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-much-is-not-enough dept.

MrPlow writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Friday March 04 2016, @06:51PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Friday March 04 2016, @06:51PM (#313852)

    It's not up to them. VR goggles require very low latency or you'll physically feel nauseous. In order to have that, you'd need to use the kernel-land. However, since all the GPU manufacturers violate each-others patents, they can't release optimized, low latency, open-source kernel drivers. So, they write kernel shims and closed source user-land drivers with obfuscated binaries. This means high-latency; Which means no VR for Linux in the foreseeable future.

    In a few years time, when GPU hardware becomes 20-30% faster (not in throughput, but in latency) than what's required for minimal VR needs, user-land drivers might be enough.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2016, @01:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2016, @01:36AM (#314013)

    VR goggles require very low latency or you'll physically feel nauseous.

    This is bullshit. The nauseous effect is caused by the disparity between your visual input and that of your inner ear's orientation to the ground. The "Muh Latency" lingo is just sales propaganda to convince you they fixed motion sickness, but it is 100% bullshit unless the machine comes with a graviton emitter.

  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday March 05 2016, @08:05PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Saturday March 05 2016, @08:05PM (#314248)

    It's not up to them. VR goggles require very low latency or you'll physically feel nauseous. In order to have that, you'd need to use the kernel-land. However, since all the GPU manufacturers violate each-others patents, they can't release optimized, low latency, open-source kernel drivers. So, they write kernel shims and closed source user-land drivers with obfuscated binaries. This means high-latency;

    wow, that's another load of shit! fun fact, you get better performance from graphics cards on Linux than you do on any version of Windows.