Oculus Announces PC Requirements for Retail Oculus Rift

It’s always been known that virtual reality would require a fairly beefy computer to stay above the requirements you need to meet for a smooth experience. Today Oculus has published the recommended specifications that your machine will need if you have any hopes of experiencing a smooth virtual experience. The bad news is, gaming laptops just aren’t going to cut it.

According to another blog post the “almost no current laptops have the GPU performance for the commended spec, though upcoming mobile GPUs may be able to support this level of performance.” This is sad news for those who might have dropped several thousand dollars on ‘gaming laptops’ recently, as it means you might be biting the bullet on virtual reality. What we don’t know yet, is if these recommended requirements will work similar to a game’s, allowing you to work around them to a degree. Only time will tell if that’s the case.

You can see the recommended specs below.

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• 8GB+ RAM
• Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
• 2x USB 3.0 ports
• Windows 7 SP1 or newer

Check out the announcement blog post for more information.

But why all this power?

The blog post went on to state that the recommend specs are based off of the power needed to render games using the Rift. Atman Binstock, Chief Architect at Oculus, says that “a traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering.”

It looks like the retail version of the Oculus Rift, which is launching in Q1 of 2016, will be a vast improvement over the Development Kit 2 that is currently available to developers and enthusiasts. This is great news, considering the reveal of HTC’s Vive, as well as the growing popularity of Open Source VR. It looks like Oculus is fining starting to gain it’s ground back, but again, time will be the true test of whether or not the Rift becomes the best VR headset on the market or not. That, of course, is another post altogether.

Oculus Announces PC Requirements for Retail Oculus Rift