Oculus Rift's Recommended PC Specs, Resolution Announced

While Oculus VR is still keeping the Oculus Rift's price under wraps, the company on Friday cleared up another major lingering question about the device. In a blog post, Oculus revealed the Rift's recommended PC specifications. To get the "full Rift experience," the following system setup is recommended.

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• 8GB+ RAM
• Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output (required)
• 2x USB 3.0 ports (required)
• Windows 7 SP1 or newer (required)

  "The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration," Oculus explained. "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."

  Previously, Oculus vice president Nate Mitchell said about the Rift's system requirements: "You're going to want a nice gaming rig. We're not talking about a high-end, crazy computer, but something that would run modern games well today."

  For a much deeper dive into Rift's PC requirements, check out this detailed blog post from Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock. He says the configuration mentioned above "will be held for the lifetime of the Rift," and notes that price should drop over time if you need to upgrade your existing setup.

  "On the raw rendering costs: a traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second," he explained. "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.

  The Rift consumer model launches in the first quarter of 2016, meaning it will arrive before April. As mentioned above, pricing has not been announced, but Oculus said today that fans can expect "more news" about the device in the lead-up to E3 next month.

  Joining Rift next year will be Sony's PlayStation 4 headset, Project Morpheus. Meanwhile, the ViveVR headset, from Valve and HTC, is due to launch later this year. Pricing for both headsets has not been announced.