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Oculus Rift will only come to Mac if Apple "ever releases a good computer"

No Oculus Rift for you OS X users, not even if you have a Mac Pro.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

Oculus Rift support will only come to the Mac platform is Apple "ever releases a good computer," Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey told Shacknews.

The problem, according to Luckey, is that Macs just don't have the GPU horsepower required to run the virtual reality headset.

"It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn't prioritize high-end GPUs," said Luckey. "You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn't match our recommended specs. So if they prioritize higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, we'd love to support Mac. But right now, there's just not a single machine out there that supports it."

Even if Apple put some serious GPU hardware inside a Mac, Luckey doesn't think there's much of a Mac audience for Oculus Rift.

"Even if we can support on the software side, there's just no audience that could run the vast majority of software on it," Luckey said.

The recommended specs for Oculus Rift on a Windows PC is as follows:

  • Graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
  • CPU: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
  • RAM: 8GB+ RAM
  • Video output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
  • USB ports: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
  • OS: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer

If you're a Mac user wanting to get in on some VR action, then you're going to need to get yourself a SteamVR headset, a Mac Pro running Windows, and an upgraded graphics card.

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