On top of the fact that there aren’t that many people who even have a good enough computer to run the Oculus Rift VR headset, there are also the few unfortunate ones who own a Mac. Despite the tense expectation of an announcement saying that the Oculus Rift will be able to run on Apple Macs, none of such thing has come. And by the looks of it, none shall be coming very soon either.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of the Oculus VR, recently made a statement to shed some light on the company’s plans regarding the not so lucky Apple computer users. After being asked if it was in the plans – whether they were short-term or long-term – Luckey said that a Mac release of the Oculus Rift is not up to them. According to him, the fate of the VR headset regarding Apple computers depends on the tech giant alone. To quote Palmer Luckey, “if they ever release a good computer, we will do it”.
While to some this may feel like this was a subtly snide remark on behalf of the Oculus VR founder, in all reality, Apple Macs are a type of computer that excels in certain areas. Gaming, and even more so virtual reality gaming, are not part of these fields.
And to cut straight to the point, the place where the Macs fail, or, at least, underperform enough to be crossed out from the Oculus Rift list of compatible computers is the graphics processing unit. Because Apple doesn’t prioritize adding highly performant and state of the art GPUs in their computers, it comes with the unfortunate limitation of virtual reality.
According to Palmer Luckey, not even the topmost rigs that Apple offers on Macs – which can take you to prices as high as $6,000 – won’t be able to run the Oculus Rift and its applications properly. If Apple decides to once again begin to pay some extra attention to their machines becoming more proficient on the graphics rendering side, then Oculus would not have any sort of trouble of porting their VR headset on this platform just as well.
Judging by the standards imposed by virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift, Apple users represent only a tiny segment of the people who won’t be able to enjoy VR very soon. According to statistics studied and released by graphic processor manufacturer Nvidia, there is a rough estimate that only 13 million computers in the world currently have enough juice to run VR devices.
Talk about a limited market.
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