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Oculus announces PC requirements for retail Oculus Rift

Oculus has taken to their blog to release the newest details surrounding the Oculus Rift. The Retail version will require quite a beefy computer to run, and gaming laptops just don't make the cut.

Josh Hawkins

May 15, 2015 1:45 PM

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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 Oculus,  “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.” This is sad news for those who might have dropped several thousand dollars on gaming laptops recently, as it means you might be missing out on virtual reality. What we don’t know yet is if these recommended requirements will work similar to a game’s specifications, 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 “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 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 finally 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.

Josh Hawkins

Guides Editor

Joshua holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and has been exploring the world of video games for as long as he can remember. He enjoys everything from large-scale RPGs to small, bite-size indie gems and everything in between.