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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 gman003 on Saturday March 05 2016, @01:46AM
They're the same hardware, but the drivers are different. That's not the issue in this case, though.
The Mac Pro is the only one with options that even come close to the Rift requirements. You can get it with two D300s, two D500s, or two D700s. Those models all seem to be exclusive to the Mac Pro, but they're based on desktop chips.
The D300 looks like an underclocked Radeon R9 270 (256-bit memory bus, 1280 shader cores). The D500 looks like a heavily cut-down version of the Radeon R9 280 - 1536 shader cores instead of the 1792 in the 280 or the 2048 in the 280X, all three on a 384-bit memory bus. And the D700 looks like a match for the 280X, with maybe some minor clockspeed differences.
Official system requirements are for a 290 or higher (512-bit memory bus, 2560 shader cores). I'm actually not sure how the dual-card setup goes in this case - VR is supposed to scale well to dual-card, better than most things, so I'd think the D500s ought to scrape by. But maybe it's bottlenecked on ROPs or something - memory access might be a big part of it, and dual-card doesn't help much with that. And I'm not sure what the software stack looks like on the Mac Pro.