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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) by takyon on Friday March 04 2016, @11:16PM
I think they want a certain gaming experience to run at the somewhat high resolution and definitively high (and more importantly, stable) framerate. The metric they like to use is pixels per second (width * height * framerate). Insert your resolution and frame rate target to get a comparison. For example, 233,280,000 pixels per second for consumer launched Oculus Rift (2160x1200x90) vs. 221,184,000 pixels per second for 1440p gaming at 60 FPS. This PPS requirement could go way up in 2018-19 when the next Oculus Rift comes out. Bump it up to widescreen 4K at a higher frame rate? 4096x2160x120 = 1,061,683,200 pixels per second, 4.5 times more.
I feel that some VR will work just fine on Oculus Rift or other VR headsets with lower powered GPUs. For one, VR video. It's much easier to display pre-rendered video, even if it is in 360°, than it is to render a game in real time, with shadows, ray tracing, blah blah blah. Also, I would assume that simpler demos with lower levels of detail and less heavy GPU work, like kaleidoscopes or other cool stuff without billions of polygons, would run just fine, even at the 90 Hz frame rate.
To get back to your question, they shouldn't lock out anybody from attempting to run something with Oculus Rift and weaker hardware. I have no idea what DRM or other restrictions will be involved, but the device will be hacked very soon after release. I expect it to be seen working with Linux, BSD, 5 year old GPUs, crappy framerate, whatever.
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