Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey has revealed the company won’t offer Oculus Rift support for Mac users until Apple makes ‘a good computer’ that’s up to spec.
In an interview with ShackNews, Luckey said Apple must offer higher end GPUs within computers before the Mac users will be able to pair up with a Rift headset.
The VR visionary pointed out that Oculus would “love to support’ Apple, but not even the $6,000 Mac Pro meets the specs recommended by Oculus.
He said: “That is up to Apple and if they ever release a good computer we will do it. It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs.
“Right now there’s just not a single machine out there that supports it so even if we can support it on the software side there’s just no audience of people that can run the vast majority of software out there.”
See also: 8 Oculus Rift games to look forward to in 2016
The founder points out none of Apple’s Mac range has close to the graphical processing power to render the 400 million shaded pixels per second necessary to effectively run VR software.
He added: “On the raw rendering costs: 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.”
With Apple’s own interest in the VR sector ramping up through recent appointments, it seems certain the company will up its game on the GPU side of things in future iMac and Mac Pro releases.
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The Rift headset is currently up for pre-order.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
