Oculus Rift preorders start at $599, with first units shipping Mar. 28
Oculus on Wednesday disclosed the long-awaited preorder details of its Oculus Rift VR headset, which will cost $599, and first begin shipping on March 28.
Each order will come with the headset, an external sensor, and an Xbox One controller, as well as a remote for simpler games and interacting with things like video and the Oculus store, the company said. Every Rift will come with a copy of Lucky's Tale, a VR platformer, but only preorders will get a copy of EVE: Valkyrie, a first-person space combat game frequently used to showcase VR.
Oculus noted that preordering a Rift will also secure a preorder position for the Touch, the company's VR-oriented controller shipping in the second half of 2016.
Because of the high system requirements for the Rift, the company is not only certifying "Oculus Ready" PCs but working with vendors to offer computer bundles that include the headset. These should be available to preorder next month starting at $1,499.
For a smooth experience the Rift will require a PC with at least Windows 7, a Core i5-4590 processor, and an Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD R9 290 video card. Owners will also need things like HDMI 1.3 output, three USB 3.0 ports, and an extra USB 2.0 connection.
Even when using Boot Camp, any Mac short of the Mac Pro will be unable to handle the Rift, since Apple prefers integrated or mobile-scaled graphics processors on most systems.
In May Oculus to decided to "pause" planned OS X support for the Oculus so it could focus on the Windows launch. No timeline was offered for when the project might resume.
Each order will come with the headset, an external sensor, and an Xbox One controller, as well as a remote for simpler games and interacting with things like video and the Oculus store, the company said. Every Rift will come with a copy of Lucky's Tale, a VR platformer, but only preorders will get a copy of EVE: Valkyrie, a first-person space combat game frequently used to showcase VR.
Oculus noted that preordering a Rift will also secure a preorder position for the Touch, the company's VR-oriented controller shipping in the second half of 2016.
Because of the high system requirements for the Rift, the company is not only certifying "Oculus Ready" PCs but working with vendors to offer computer bundles that include the headset. These should be available to preorder next month starting at $1,499.
For a smooth experience the Rift will require a PC with at least Windows 7, a Core i5-4590 processor, and an Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD R9 290 video card. Owners will also need things like HDMI 1.3 output, three USB 3.0 ports, and an extra USB 2.0 connection.
Even when using Boot Camp, any Mac short of the Mac Pro will be unable to handle the Rift, since Apple prefers integrated or mobile-scaled graphics processors on most systems.
In May Oculus to decided to "pause" planned OS X support for the Oculus so it could focus on the Windows launch. No timeline was offered for when the project might resume.
Comments
I do scientific simulation for a living and I produce a lot of 3D videos that we currently show using 3D TVs... being able to use a rift to look at 3D simulation results might be interesting...
I have no doubt that we'll get to VR substantively in a couple of years, but it all seems a little to early and a little too clunky at this point.
More importantly, that's why I am 'dubious', and not certain. If you'd take a moment to actually read and comprehend what I wrote, that is..
if you want to explore using an off-the-shelf solution using an iPhone 3D viewer a bit sooner, PM me and I'll describe the viewer I've been making. The various VR viewers commercially available now don't work at all well for 3D videos, as I'm sure you know. But phone viewers with the right geometry and optics for just plain 3D are another story.
D300? It's the slowest Pitcairn GPU that AMD offers, and even lowering specs won't save the card. It's about a third behind the required specs to run an occulus. You can have it run, but you'll need to make your rift the primary display and place it to the left of your normal display. Set rift display to 90°, 1080p and 75fps and don't use Mirror, otherwise you'll suffer unusable performance drops. I've played with devkits on the mac pros at work, but nothing extensive.
Oculus themselves don't really plan on supporting Macs - it's not their target audience (why on earth is this being reported here?). Apple goes for thin and lightweight, which doesn't equal gaming powerhouse, and the only GPU Apple offer close to Oculus' recommendations is the Mac Pro, and even then it's a workstation card not really optimised for gaming.
Dual D700's. In Windows (Bootcamp) it does Crossfire which works well with the 4K monitor it's hooked to. I think it will be able to drive the Occulus as long as the scene complexity doesn't get out of control. We'll see..
Not only does the device cost $600, it requires a fairly high end computer adding more to the cost.
The technology is nice and for those who are willing to spend the substantial sums to acquire all of the hardware necessary, I am certain that it will provide a nice experience. But I'm not a hardcore gamer and most people aren't either.
I have plans on upgrading my current LCD television to the 65 inch LG OLED model and I suspect the market for high OLED televisions will be far larger than the one for the Oculus.
The device is not portable and therefore the market for it will be quite small.
It's interesting to see Apple move to portable computing while Microsoft can't break itself out of the desktop model.
Once Apple puts that A9X CPU into the next version of the iPad Air, the sales of Windows laptops will further tank and that includes the Surface in any version.
Intel is utterly non-competitive with the A9X and that translates into a high cost machine with inferior performance and reduced battery life.
Being tethered to an outlet will be the undoing of the Oculus product. This may be somewhat profitable to MSFT, but it will not do much in making the obscene profits for MSFT that Windows and Office did.
Very likely that this piece of hardware goes the way of the Zune and Windows RT. I am rather fond of technology but the Oculus does not interest me other than as nothing more than a technology demonstration.
On top of the fact most VR stuff doesn't support SLI/Crossfire right now (lots of rendering techniques that break standard implementations like AFR), D700s, which are the absolute top of the line for mac pros, are really just slightly weaker and re-braded FirePro W9000s. Here's a quick comparison between the GPU power of one of those cards and a 970. If/When VR stuff starts working better with SLI then maybe you might be able to power a rift, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2281&cmp[]=2954