Info Tech Virtual reality has the potential to transform PC gaming in ways not seen since 3D acceleration became affordable in the late 1990s. While we don’t recommend pre-ordering either an Oculus or Vive until reviews and performance data are both available, we’re still excited about the long-term potential for the medium. For now, however, that medium is going to be Windows-only.
ShackNews caught up with Oculus CEO Palmer Lucky and asked him a question at least a few Mac fans had to be wondering about: Would Oculus Rift support the Mac?
“That is up to Apple,” Palmer said. “If they ever release a good computer, we will do it.”
Perhaps realizing he’d just written headlines across the entire tech industry, the CEO went on to clarify his thoughts: “It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs. 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.”
While he didn’t exactly sugarcoat the truth, objective evidence suggests Palmer is correct. The top-end GPU in the Mac Pro is the D700. This is essentially equivalent to a Radeon HD 7970 (GCN 1.0) but with 6GB of VRAM rather than 3GB. While it’s true that a pair of HD 7970s would likely outperform the single GTX 970 that Oculus recommends as a minimum GPU for VR, most VR titles are still single-GPU only. We’ve seen some VR demos that allowed the system to dedicate one GPU to each eye, but that kind of implementation isn’t normal.
Furthermore, Apple doesn’t just take the drivers that AMD or Nvidia create for OS X and then certify them — it does at least some of the work in-house. Software like Nvidia’s Control Panel or the Catalyst Control Center don’t get distributed with OS X.
I suspect Apple will commission a refresh on the Mac Pro and iMac graphics solutions when AMD and/or Nvidia move to 14nm GPUs, at which point they may well be powerful enough to drive an Oculus Rift. Apple, however, has expressed no great interest in VR technology, and given its lackluster graphics updates and focus on its own API, Metal, Palmer might be limited to providing Oculus support to Mac users willing to run Windows. Macs are perfectly good computers for a great many tasks, but they’ve never been GPU powerhouses, and Apple doesn’t put much effort into staying on top of the technology curve. If it did, the Mac Pro would at least offer GPUs based on AMD’s top-end workstation cards.