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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

Graphics card question: If I wanted to run my own software on this (ie. I don't care about AAA games), would any old graphics card do, as long as I'm only rendering very simple, low polygon scenes? Or is there something inherent in the high end graphics cards that makes them essential?

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From the hardware FAQ on /r/oculus:

"Can I use a weaker PC for basic content?

With weaker hardware, it may be possible to run very graphically simplistic content like virtual desktop, virtual cinema (for watching movies), and 360 videos, however you will be totally on your own without support if you choose to do this, and it is unlikely that there will be many (or any) games that support lower specs.

If you do wish to take this non-recommended path, your PC must at least meet the absolute minimum requirements:

    Video Card: GTX 650 / AMD 7750 desktop GPU or better and newer
    USB Ports: 2x USB 3.0 ports
    Video Output: free HDMI 1.3 output
    OS: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer

Remember: The Rift will not run on your laptop, this rule does not change!" https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/wiki/requirements

> The Rift will not run on your laptop, this rule does not change!

IMHO, this is the biggest issue. The computer landscape has shifted towards laptops/mobile and now this device requires a device whose marketshare is shrinking.

Not so much among PC gamers, from what I've seen. And that's really the market that matters. Not many other segments are still buying high power desktops, but they certainly are.

With a Gen1 release, Oculus is trying to build its "core audience" which will be the PC Gamer. Any serious PC gamer will have built their own custom rig to play games. As long as they can nail this audience, they'll be able to grow from there with more "mass consumer" equipment to target lower capability computers.

This makes me think a better nickname for this revision is Hobbyist Version rather than Consumer Version.

Yes, it feels like a big mistake. An external box containing the necessary graphics hardware should probably be a part of the Oculus package - it seems to be setting itself up for failure by pretending to be a display, rather than a graphics pipeline.

Lots of their target market already has suitable video cards, and don't want to pay $400 extra for a downgrade. And what would you plug the box into? I've read that there are specs for external PCIe x16 ports and enclosures but I've literally never seen one.

Assuming that box would add 300$ more to the package price, you would be close to sinking four digits when it turns out that VR is more immersion than you like. In that case, a regular GPU upgrade will happily drive your conventional screens, whereas an Oculus box would likely be dead weight causing or at least cause all kinds of compatibility headaches when repurposed for conventional display use.

That's odd, I've been using a laptop to demo Rift tech for some time...

(Although it's quite a beefy laptop, optimised for 3D work.)

You're fortunate. Yes, there are some laptops that can do it, but most have NVidia Optimus getting in the way, and it's nearly impossible to tell which ones are okay and which are not just from spec sheets, so I can see why they just say "no laptops".

I used to use a MacBook Pro from 2011 with the DK1, and it worked just fine.

Did you Bootcamp to Windows 7, or is there something that runs natively on OS X?

I used Windows, because the rest of the hackathon team I was on was using Windows. We were using Unity, but we didn't want there to be any problems getting the code to run on multiple OSs. I know that Unity makes it easy to do that, but we didn't want to risk it.

Edit: Also remembered that we used as Kinect, which requires Windows

Sadly, this is what stopped me from considering the Oculus Rift. My expectations were wrong in thinking this would be more of a mass-consumer oriented product instead of targeting VR hobbyists'*

Basically, forcing people to shell out ATLEAST 1600$ to be able to use it (not to mention making them buy a desktop).

Aside: I was always more interested in the potential of Gear VR. Thanks for the info.

You don't need to spend anywhere close to $1600. I just put together http://pcpartpicker.com/p/p8MjmG with only a little consideration for price and it's less than $900 while exceeding the requirements.

$885 (PC you linked) + $600 (Rift) = $1485

That's pretty close.

Unfortunately this is the way it will be for the immediate future - the combination of high resolution requirements and high refresh rate requirements means that any VR application will have to render a lot more pixels than "typical" games on phones/PCs.

You can for example get away with rendering at 30Hz for a typical game, but that's a recipe for nausea in VR - where you'd want 90-120Hz instead. That's a lot of extra pixels immediately.

Even something as simple as a virtual desktop is going to be pretty performance intensive if only because of how many pixels your hardware has to push around.

There's not really a good way to make a mass-consumer (i.e., low-end PC, mid-end phone) version of this tech yet, and probably not in the near future either since any hardware gains we make (either in mobile or desktop) will be poured into visual fidelity.

It's in between right now. It's not just targeted at 'VR hobbyists', but it IS targeted at tech early adopters/hardcore gamers. Give it a few more years and I'm sure the price will slowly come down.

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/powering-the-rift/

  Apart from the recommended spec, the Rift will require:

    *Windows 7 SP1 or newer
    *2x USB 3.0 ports
    *HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture

It sounds like being able to pump out 2160×1200 at 90Hz is a fixed requirement, and not all videos cards can even do that based on the connectors available

It's how I got started on my DK2. It's how I use my Galaxy Note 3 with a headset. Yes, it's completely possible.

I think you'd be OK, but I can't say for sure, as I haven't tried it. Nothing I know of that would prevent you doing that, though.

You would probably need a card that supported DX11 or equivalent and possibly DX12 - not sure about the CV1 spec on that.

I'm not an expert -- but I have heard the number 3.5x thrown around, i.e., the basic point is that a VR-rendered scene is 3.5x as computationally expensive as a standard scene.

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