Facebook believes VR will become the new realityI’m no gamer, but I have been looking forward to getting one of these cool Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The consumer version of the Rift will need a newer graphics cards to run games and other virtual reality experiences at “recommended” settings, Oculus VR stated in a blog post on Friday Nvidia’s GTX 970 graphics card came out early in 2014 and the AMD Radeon R9 290 in late 2013, meaning these are still relatively expensive graphics cards.We’ve known for a while that virtual reality is going to require some serious computing power, and now Oculus VR — the Facebook subsidiary working on the Rift headset — is sharing the hardware specifications that it thinks you should have before it releases its consumer product in Q1 2016.
We’re still a little while off from the Oculus Rift’s official consumer launch – pre-orders are starting later this year, the company revealed recently, with shipping beginning early next year.During a ‘Town Hall Q&A session’, founder Mark Zuckerberg said that within the next 12 years virtual and augmented reality headsets will be so small, people will wear them like normal glasses. ‘Every 10 or 15 years a completely new computing platform comes along, so in the 1990s we had these desktop computers, and now we have these much more intuitive devices with phones and tablets. But the company has now revealed the recommended specifications for PC rigs powering the Oculus Rift headset, which gives potential buyers a good idea of what kind of system they need to save up for in time for next year.
Now, the company is revealing the specs you’ll need to get those experiences on the final Oculus Rift—and it looks like you’ll be spending $800+ just for the desktop computer. Here’s what you’ll need: That’s certainly not the world’s most expensive PC — it doesn’t, for example, involve the Titan X graphics card that Nvidia introduced specifically with VR in mind. A speedy frame rate is key to a quality VR experience, as anything below 75 frames per second tends to make some people feel nauseous. “The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration,” reads an Oculus blog. “Ultimately, we believe this will be fundamental to VR’s success, as developers can optimize and tune their game for a known specification, consistently achieving presence and simplifying development.” But, of course, not everyone will have a PC that matches what Oculus wants, and that highlights one of the big problems both the Rift and Valve’s Steam VR products will face.
Building the PC with these recommended specs yourself, right now, could cost about $1,000 to $1,200, according to PC building spec site Logical Increments. But our very rough mockup puts it at around $1,000 or more for a desktop, and laptop owners are probably out of luck, according to Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock: Many discrete GPU laptops have their external video output connected to the integrated GPU and drive the external output via hardware and software mechanisms that can’t support the Rift. Here’s what Oculus recommends for the best Rift experience, along with set-in-stone requirements for what yo absolutely must have on your hardware: In their blog post, Oculus’ Chef Architect Atman Binstock provides some of the reasoning behind these spec recommendations – GPU performance is highly important, since you’re basically running two, 2160×1200 displays at 90Hz simultaneously, which takes around three times the GPU power of your average full HD, 1080p rendering. And among the questions about how content is filtered on News Feeds and the future of Pages, Mr Zuckerberg was also asked what he will wear in the future when he can no longer wear T-shirts and hoodies.
The new update includes major changes to the kit’s compositor service, layers, the removal of application-based distortion rendering, simplification of the API, and other performance and quality improvements. Mr Zuckerberg’s comments about VR follow those made by Michael Abrash, chief scientist from Facebook-owned virtual reality (VR) experts Oculus at the site’s F8 conference earlier this year. Note that almost no current laptops have the GPU performance for the recommended spec, though upcoming mobile GPUs may be able to support this level of performance. Basically, as it stands with those specs and current hardware, you’ll need a desktop PC to work with Oculus – notebooks are basically classed out, and in what may be worse news, Oculus has also announced that Mac development (and Linus support) are paused while the team focuses on getting Windows Rift software to where it needs to be for launch. Mr Abrash said The Matrix provides the best sense of what virtual reality could someday be like and he used optical tricks to prove that we are merely ‘inference machines’ and the world we see now is already an illusion. ‘If you are talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.’ ‘Unlike Morpheus, I’m not offering you a choice,’ said Mr Abrash. ‘No matter what choice you pick, we’re all headed down the rabbit hole together.’ This refers to the pills offered to Neo in The Matrix.
It’s also worth noting the specs require the Windows operating system; early Oculus Rift development kits could run natively on Macs, provided the software was compatible. Founded in 2012 by Brendan Iribe and VR prodigy Palmer Luckey (read Forbes’ cover story about Luckey here), Oculus VR was purchased by Facebook last spring in a deal worth $2 billion. Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. If he takes the blue pill the story ends and he is told he will wake up in his bed and ‘believe whatever he wants to believe’. ‘Morpheus made two critical points with his sentence: our conscious minds never actually interact with the real world and that we interact with sensors on our eyes, ears and tongue, and throughout our body. Oculus VR VP of Product Nate Mitchell sidestepped a question about Mac support at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this month, so this already seemed like a possibility.
Other tech giants interested in virtual reality include Microsoft , which is developing the HoloLens Augmented Reality headset; Google , which has dabbled in the technology with a DIY rig made of (and called) Cardboard; Sony , which is developing a headset for its PlayStation game consoles called Project Morpheus; and Valve and HTC , which are co-developing a headset called Vive. And while the GTX 970/R9 290 are definitely not bottom-of-the-barrel cards, it’s definitely a lower barrier to entry for VR than a lot of people anticipated. Oculus promises that the specs will stay the same for the lifetime of the current Rift consumer edition, so they’ll presumably get cheaper as time goes on. For now, though, the Rift is still very much a device for somebody who’s willing to put money towards an expensive PC… which right now is mostly gamers.