The Oculus Rift won’t support Linux or OS X at launch

The intimidating hardware requirements for the Oculus Rift wasn’t the only thing that Oculus VR disappointed us with last week, the company also made it clear that the virtual reality headset won’t work with Linux or OS X at launch. While compatibility for those two operating systems is expected in the future, development has been put on hold so that Oculus VR can fully optimize the Windows virtual reality experience, which is what most users will be running. 

Along with needing some presently high-powered hardware to use the Oculus Rift VR headset, users will also need to use Windows instead of either Mac or Linux operating systems, Oculus has announced. “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,” said Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock in a blog post. “We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.” While announcing that the company would focus purely on Windows development for the short-term, Oculus also revealed the hardware baselines for Rift headset, which the company said it intended to support over the lifetime of Rift. Oculus is specifying an Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD 290 chipset or greater to handle the graphics, over 8 gigabytes of RAM in the computer, and at least an Intel i5 4590 CPU. A system capable of the “full Rift experience” will also need Windows 7 SP1 or greater, two USB 3.0 ports, and HDMI 1.3 output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture.