14 DAY TRIAL // The Oculus Rift is now officially set to deliver its consumer version in the first quarter of 2016 and the team working on the virtual reality device is ready to offer more details about the hardware requirements associated with it.
Atman Binstock, the chief architect and technical director, explains in an official blog post that the recommended configuration associated with the coming platform is designed to make sure that developers will be able to offer quality experiences to gamers.
Oculus Rift experiences will run on a computer that has:
Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD Radeon 290 or better graphics card Intel i5 4590 or better processor 8 GM of RAM or more Windows 7 Service Pack 1 or better 2 USB 230 ports HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture
Binstock states, "Good stereo VR with positional tracking directly drives your perceptual system in a way that a flat monitor can’t. As a consequence, rendering techniques and quality matter more than ever before, as things that are imperceivable on a traditional monitor suddenly make all the difference when experienced in VR."
He also says that the configuration will not change across the lifetime of the Oculus Rift, which in time should lead to lower access prices for users.
The developer of the Oculus Rift also goes into technical detail about the requirements and the way virtual reality places additional stress on the PC hardware.
It seems that at the moment a very limited range of laptops are offering the required specifications, although more will do so in the coming months and years.
Oculus Rift will have to deliver an impressive experience to capture the attention of users
Virtual reality is currently having its moment in the gaming space, and the Oculus Rift is closely watched because it was the first device to be announced, and it received a lot of support via Kickstarter.
The company has released two development versions and says that the new consumer-focused device will include better technology than both of them.
The Oculus Rift will have to deal with strong competition from Vive, a device that is being created by Valve and HTC, and from Project Morpheus from Sony, which is only delivered for the PlayStation 4.
The one major problem that none of the virtual reality developers has solved yet is a relative lack of experiences designed to make the tech seem like an integral part of gaming.
