There’s a palpable buzz of excitement across the four corners of the industry over the virtual reality renaissance. Just when the market was seemingly written off as a fad in the early 90s, Oculus stepped in with an eye-catching device of its own, the Oculus Rift, which single-handedly reinvigorated the flailing VR market. Fast forward two years and, following the Facebook acquisition, the anticipated hardware is nearing its consumer launch in early 2016, and today, the company confirmed the specs that you’ll need to run the VR headset at launch.
Running from an adjacent PC, the recommended specifications are certainly high-end, and unless you already own a beefy gaming rig at home, chances are you’ll have to upgrade some components before being able to run the Rift natively.
Without further ado, here are those specs in question:
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
In a detailed blog post, Oculus noted that the headset itself might function on specs below this threshold, but given that developers have been instructed to aim at these specs in order to maximize performance, anything lower will no doubt impact the overall experience. Here’s what the development team behind the Oculus Rift had to say on the matter.
“This configuration will be held for the lifetime of the Rift and should drop in price over time. The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration. Ultimately, we believe this will be fundamental to VR’s success, as developers can optimize and tune their game for a known specification, consistently achieving presence and simplifying development.”
Oculus will likely have a big presence at E3 2015 ahead of the Oculus Rift‘s consumer launch in 2016. As always, we’ll keep you posted when we learn more.