Virtual reality company Oculus VR lifted the hood on its highly-anticipated Oculus Rift headset Friday morning, revealing the PC hardware necessary to run games and apps on the device, and releasing a new software development kit for developers interested in writing those programs.
In a blog post published on Oculus' web site, the company recommended a base configuration for computers that will be able to deliver a "full Rift experience":
- 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
"The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration by default," Oculus VR Chief Architect Atman Binstock wrote in a detailed companion post. "We believe this 'it just works' experience will be fundamental to VR’s success, given that an underperforming system will fail to deliver comfortable presence."
The specifications indicate that users should have a computer with powerful, modern components, but the price tag for a compatible PC shouldn't be very high: The most expensive component, an Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card, currently retails for about $329. A brand new computer that includes all the specified hardware could be purchased today for around $800.
Oculus also announced that the latest version of its software development kit, Oculus PC SDK 0.6.0, is now available via their Developer Center. The new update includes major changes to the kit's compositor service, layers, the removal of application-based distortion rendering, simplification of the API, and other performance and quality improvements.
Last week Oculus revealed that it will start taking pre-orders for the first consumer version of the Rift later this year, and will begin shipping the devices to consumers in the first quarter of 2016.
Founded in 2012 by Brendan Iribe and VR prodigy Palmer Luckey (read Forbes' cover story about Luckey here), Oculus VR was purchased by Facebook last spring in a deal worth $2 billion.
Other tech giants interested in virtual reality include
