Last week Oculus revealed that it will start taking pre-orders for the consumer version later this year, and that it will begin shipping the devices to consumers in the first quarter of 2016.
Now the company publicized the hardware requirement that are necessary to run applications and games for the consumer version. They also brought a new SDK for the developers. In the detailed companion blog post from the Chief Architect Atman Binstock we can read that the goal is to run all Rift games and applications on this hardware configuration by default.
Oculus recommended a surprisingly simple configuration. To be able to get a “full Rift experience.” They advise a NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290 equivalent or greater graphical cars. An Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater is enough processor power. With 8GB RAM or more you should have more than enough memory. You need a compatible HDMI 1.3 video output port and two USB 3.0 ports which are probably for the positional tracker and the HMD. You can run the software on a Windows 7 SP1 or newer. Strangely Mac OS X isn’t named and also Linux is forgotten to mention.
A compatible PC doesn’t have a very high price tag. The most expensive component is the NVIDIA GTX 970 graphics card, which currently sales for about $329/€340. A brand new computer that includes all the specified hardware can be hoarded for around $800.
The announced version of its software development kit, Oculus PC SDK 0.6.0, includes major changes to the kit’s compositor service and layers. Oculus VR removed application-based distortion rendering and simplified the API. They also did a lot to the performance and quality of their SDK.
