On Friday, the Oculus VR dev team released their spec requirements for the headset, and it"s fair to say that you"ll need quite a decent rig to "experience the Oculus Rift at its peak". A reminder of those specs below.
For the full Rift experience, we recommend the following system:
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
However, the Oculus team were not quite done with announcements on the day, as the Chief Architect at Oculus and technical director of the Rift, Atman Binstock, also submitted a follow up blog post explaining the reason for the hardware requirements.
Buried in the penultimate paragraph of the post, Binstock goes on to say that OSX and Linux development for the VR headset has been "paused" with no definitive timeline for its revival:
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. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.
The statement was met with widespread disapproval in the comments of the post, with one developer stating:
As a game developer who thinks you"ve just shot yourself in the foot by abandoning OS X, I"ve decided to abandon Rift. My games will still be available for Windows and OS X (and Linux), I just won"t support Rift.
Similar comments echo the above one, but it"s clear to see where Oculus VR sees the headsets potential, and for now, it appears to align with that of Windows; you can read the full blog post here.
Thanks for the tip Max Norris!