Oculus Founder Says Rift Will Come To Mac if Apple “Ever Releases A Good Computer”

When Oculus announced the consumer version of the Rift virtual reality headset almost a year ago, it was said that the unit would only support Windows PCs at launch. This was a turnaround from the development kits that worked on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. Now Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has said “its up to Apple” to get the Rift on the Mac, saying “if they ever release a good computer, we will do it”.

Oculus Rift

Luckey went on to explain that even the highest-end Mac you can buy would not provide an enjoyable experience on the final rift hardware, which is more powerful than the early development kits. “It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs,” he explained. “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.”

Luckey has not shied away from saying negative things about low-end hardware. Back in 2013 he said that new consoles like the Xbox One and Playstation 4 were, “too limited” for the Oculus Rift. And back in January said that for most users, “your crappy PC is the biggest barrier to adoption [for high-end VR]…”

Will Oculus ever get Mac support? Back in May Oculus Chief Architect Atman Binstock said that OS X and Linux support had been “paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux, but we don’t have a timeline.”

It looks like PC is where its going to be if you want the best VR experience possible, at least for the time being.

Source: Anandtech | News Archive

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