It has been a long road to a consumer release for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, and it is not over yet, but today Oculus VR took one step closer by finally revealing the device’s recommended system specs.

“Presence is the first level of magic for great VR experiences: the unmistakable feeling that you’ve been teleported somewhere new,” Oculus said on its blog. “Comfortable, sustained presence requires a combination of the proper VR hardware, the right content, and an appropriate system.”

The recommended specs for “the full Rift experience” include:

• 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

It is no surprise that Rift requires a beefy system, and some of these specs are higher than those found on many low-end or even mid-range gaming rigs.

Atman Binstock, Chief Architect at Oculus and technical director of the Rift, explained the factors behind why VR has such high requirements in a more detailed blog post.

“On the raw rendering costs: a traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second,” Atman explained. “In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering.”

Binstock also explained that in order to focus on improving the PC experience for Rift, Oculus has decided to suspend development for OS X and Linux for the time being.

“Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows,” Binstock wrote. “We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.”

There is currently no release date for Oculus Rift, but it is expected to arrive in the first half of 2016.

photo credit: Sergey Galyonkin via photopin cc