The Oculus Rift is one of the most popular virtual realism headsets in the humans at the moment , with the company , arguably , being creditworthy for the practical reality boom that we ’re see at the moment . Oculus founder Palmer Luckey create the image Oculus Rift in his parent ’s garage back in 2011 when he was only 18 years erstwhile , and when it hit Kickstarter , he get $ 2.5 million in financial support .
Since then , a turn of other practical reality headsets have appeared , from the more budget ( Homido VR headset ) to the more extravagant ( HTC Vive ) . Oculus even gotbought by Facebookfor an eye - watering $ 2bn , which should give you some idea of how important virtual reality is , and not just in the gambling world .
But with the Oculus Rift now pronto available in the UK , the doubt is – can you use Oculus Rift with yourMac ? Here is where we explain all you necessitate to do it about Oculus Rift Mac support .
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Can you use Oculus Rift with Mac?
While once upon a sentence the notion of using the Oculus Rift on a Mac was nothing more than a fallal , a recent declaration atWWDC 2017 change all that . But before we get to the exciting declaration , let us first give you a brief chronicle of Oculus Rift Mac support .
Oculus puts a hold on Mac support
For a while , it was take on that the Oculus Rift would mould with Mac just as it was intended to ferment with Windows , but back in May 2015 , the company cleared up the muddiness in ablog post . lamentably , it was n’t the intelligence that VR fans with a Mac were waiting for – in fact , the blog post inform users that development for bothOS Xand Linux had been paused to focus efforts on the PC release .
Atman Binstock of Oculus wrote : “ Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in purchase order to center on present a high - timber consumer - stage VR experience at launch across hardware , package , and content on Windows . We want to get back to maturation for OS X and Linux but we do n’t have a timeline . ”
Now , admittedly , the selection of game useable for Mac users is nowhere near as large as what ’s available on Windows , but it seems that it may not be a want of games that forced Oculus ’ hired man on suspending Mac support – in fact , it seems to be more about specification than anything else .
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Most Macs aren’t powerful enough
In the sameblog post , Atman Binstock went on to explain that the graphical magnate required to power a full VR experience was n’t available on any Mac or laptop ( aside from one or two , maybe ) . “ almost no current laptops have the GPU execution for the recommended spec , though coming mobile GPUs may be able to support this grade of public presentation ” Binstock note .
This is in spades lawful of the Mac mini , MacBook Air and the 13 in MacBook Pro as they all boast Intel integrated graphic card , which does n’t even come in tight to being able to power the Rift . The Mac Pro vaunt threefold AMD FirePro cards , although these are n’t optimize for gaming and without the software package backup to go along with the ironware , it could n’t power the Rift anyway .
The full advocate spec for the Oculus Rift as is follow :
During an IGN hot consultation with Luckey Palmer , X - CEO of Oculus , back at E3 2015 , he evoke that it may not figure out with Macs anytime soon . During the audience , Palmer enounce , “ It ’s not pop off to go on any MacBook that exists or is known to exist in the near future . ” He play along up the remark with “ One of the things that we really announced is that we ’re putting Mac accompaniment on hold for launch , and focusing on Windows . mass have said , ‘ Why do n’t you stand Macs ? So many people have Macs . ’ It ’s genuine . A mountain of people have Apple computer hardware , specially in the laptop computer space . But the GPUs in those , they ’re not even close to what we ’re pushing for our recommend specification . ”
“ If they prioritise higher - end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day , we ’d love to patronize Mac,”Luckey continued to excuse . “But right on now , there ’s just not a single machine out there that supports it . So even if we can hold it on the software package side , there ’s just no audience of the great unwashed that can course the vast majority of software program out there . ”
Apple announces VR support at WWDC 2017
It looks as if Luckey Palmer may have to live up to his words ( or at least his fellow worker at Oculus will , anyway ) as Apple late made a numeral of computer hardware - relate proclamation at WWDC 2017 that directly affect practical reality . For one , Apple announce the iMac Pro , a VR - ready Mac powerful enough to fork over high - end graphics thanks to its discrete graphic card . While it ’s not out until the end of the year , it ’s a mansion of diagrammatically powerful Macs to issue forth .
In fact , Apple did n’t block up there ; the fellowship also offers discrete graphics card in many variants of iMac available right now , ranging from the Radeon Pro 555 or 560 with up to 4 GB VRAM in the 21.5 in iMac with 4 K show , to the 27 in range that boasts a Radeon Pro 570 , 575 or 580 with up to 8 GB VRAM .
Along with the more powerful ironware , Apple announce that SteamVR will be macOS compatible , entail those with a muscular enough Mac can create or play VR games without a personal computer . Now , while SteamVR supporting suggests that the Oculus Rift will work on on Mac , we ’re yet to have ratification from Oculus . Yes , SteamVR fully supports the Oculus Rift , but Oculus will still need to recrudesce macOS - compatible drivers to power the headset .
On the other hand , HTC and Valve have confirm that the HTC Vive will be fully compatible with macOS later on this year . Great news !
So , while users ca n’t presently use the Oculus Rift on a Mac , we expect that to modify in the very dear future . We ’ll update this article with new information as soon as we receive it , so check out back sporadically for update on Oculus Rift Mac support .
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