Final ‘Oculus Rift’ Requirements: “$800” Gaming PC for full experience
Oculus has revealed the requirements for their Oculus Rift, and according to Gizmodo it’s an “$800 PC.” First off, I suppose that’s not that bad. I mean, can you put a price on haptic-suit transhuman cyber sex? And second off, who knows how much all of the junk required for the rig will run when the Rift actually drops.
We’ve always known that good virtual reality wouldn’t come cheap. From the beginning, Oculus used beefy gaming PCs to show off its VR headset. Now, the company is revealing the specs you’ll need to get those experiences on the final Oculus Rift—and it looks like you’ll be spending $800+ just for the desktop computer.
Oculus says these are the recommended specs “for the 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
Honestly, that’s not too bad—considering that Oculus also just revealed that the final Rift needs to push 400 million pixels per second. With two displays inside running at a combined resolution of 2160 x 1200, refreshing 90 times per second, plus some additional headroom (so you can move your head around without seeing things that haven’t loaded yet), Oculus says the Rift requires approximately three times the GPU performance you normally need to play games at 1080p.
But that means you’ll be paying quite a bit if you want to jump in. I just whipped together a quick PC system build at PCPartPicker with some of the cheapest (yet tried and true) components you can get, and it added up to just over $800 after discounts and rebates.