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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, Informative) by mobydisk on Friday March 04 2016, @07:42PM
I keep hearing that same thing, but it doesn't add-up. Not sure about today, but ~5 years ago, the FireGL was actually the same hardware as the gaming GPUs, but with slightly different drivers and about twice the cost.
What "accuracy" are they referring to? The video card is just rendering, right? It's not doing any of the engineering work.
I right now can see the mechanical engineers a few cubes over from me using SolidWorks on their expensive FireGL cards. I see non-anti-aliased lines and simple solid filled polygons. Now, if you told me the driver needs to be optimized for the raw number of lines and polys, I might believe you. But if so, you'd think they could at least get something other than badly aliased lines. It looks like the software-only 3D I got on my 386 years ago. Actually worse - the lines aren't even solid - they have holes and dashes in them when they go to high angles. It's really quite poor. What gives?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday March 05 2016, @03:40AM
As I recall one of the big issues is depth buffer accuracy - that weirdness/sparkling you get when two faces intersect, or when two parallel faces are at *almost* the same distance and you end up seeing the far one instead of the near one. That's unacceptable for professional graphics, but a common result of major performance-boosting compromises.