One question we were dying to ask is he sees a future for the Oculus Rift with Apple computers. When asked if there would ever be Mac support for the Rift, Palmer responds by saying “That is up to Apple. If they ever release a good computer, we will do it.”
Palmer continues to clarify what he meant by that blunt statement by saying “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.”
Harsh, but true. This simply isn’t a market Apple is serving right now. Note: I’m not saying they should, just that they don’t.
This is why gaming stays (mostly) on Windows. I bought a Mac Book Pro for $2500 last year and it can’t play any games because the video card is lousy. That’s why I have a desktop with a decent card.
Quite right.
As someone that used to spend quite some time gaming and doing graphics programming, the CPU/GPU combo was always very important to me.
Only the Mac Book Pro do offer something that a graphics programmer could consider as hardware worth programming for.
However a Thinkpad W (graphics workstation laptop) costs 1000 ^a'not less and offers way more CPU/GPU capabilities.
Those 1000 ^a'not make a huge difference in the average salary of many European countries.
Funny enough, Unity3D started out as a game engine for Macs, they only went multiplatform with version 2.5.
If your product cannot run decently in an octa-core Xeon with two AMD FirePro D700… maybe the problem is NOT the computer… the problem is YOUR product.
IMHO with this stupid attitude Oculus will create the biggest flop since the Virtual Boy.
Newsflash: Workstation CPU and GPU not optimal for gaming. Film at 11.
On a mac, there is literally no difference between the Fire Pro and Radeons – they use the same driver, and the FirePros in the Mac Pro lack ECC ram that the PC counterparts have.
I get what your saying, but from a gaming perspective the FirePro D700 is actually a pretty damn weak card. It is a 4 year old design with about half the TFLOPs of what is considered upper mid-range now (GTX 950 for example). You can easily buy a gaming GPU for less than $200 that outperforms it now a days (in games anyway).
Plus, having two of them makes no difference on OSX because they do not actually use crossfire to gang their resources… The 2nd card can be used for compute purposes or to give you more physical screens, but thats it. Outside of that, especially in games, the 2nd card is useless.
edit – not half the TFLOPS, half the texture/pixel fill rate – which matters much more for most games. The D700 is still very competitive when it comes to compute, although even there is no longer at the ultra high end.
Edited 2016-03-03 22:12 UTC
This is incorrect – you can use both GPUs for rendering, but you (the developer) just have to handle it yourself. The driver won’t do it for you.
Of course, if you run Windows on the Mac Pro, the two chips show up as two FirePro cards with the consumer-level CrossfireX.
But there are no games I am aware of that support that…
I’ll bet the majority of Mac Pros are sold to people that wont’ put games on it, as oppsed to workstation stuff.
Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if few Pro apps support using both for graphics, too
Sure, I also think 99.9% of Mac Pro users don’t give a shit about Oculus. BTW what really annoys me is this l33t Oculus’ attitude… it’s a shame, they changed 180 degrees!!
Oculus started as a ~$300 kickstarter product: “VR for the masses” they said. DK1 and DK2 had that price point and Oculus gear kind of worked with regular Windows and Mac computers.
Then Oculus was acquired by Facebook… and magically the “VR for masses” turned into a $700+ elite product that cannot run ok even in a $6000 Mac Pro!!! C’mon!!!
I don’t buy this Oculus bullshit, I think Facebook marketing team found a niche market for Oculus (hardcore PC gamers) and now they are 100% focused on milking money out of them.
Don’t refer to the Mac Pro as a $6,000 computer.
It’s a <$1,000 computer, being sold for $6,000 for some insane reason.
Edited 2016-03-04 02:07 UTC
Where does this $6000 everyone is throwing around come from? The base model is half that. That is with a $350 CPU, $200 worth of memory, and a couple of GPUs worth (very conservatively estimated) about $200-$300 each.
If you look at a $6000 config (which I’m assuming is an 3Ghz/8 core/25MB cache E5 with 2 D700s), the CPU alone costs more than $1000…
Those are discount retail component prices, not Apple prices (except the GPUs since you can’t actually buy those exact cards in the market).
I am not saying it is a steal, the things have a markup – no argument. But saying it is worth less than $1000 is just hyperbole… Reality is the pricing, while it certainly higher than what it would cost to build similar machines yourself, is actually quite competitive in the market it competes in (i.e. workstations).
Now you could argue that the component choices Apple makes are overpriced relative to their actual value for many users – I won’t argue with that at all. They could build a very good machine for much less money by making some different component choices.
But they are what they are, and for what they are the price is actually fairly competitive.
Someone is certainly going to mod me down for it because they don’t want to hear facts, but I don’t really care… Mod away
The CPU costs $300 now, the GPUs are about $255 retail these days.
Apple charges about 4x retail for their RAM.
Look. Mac Pros are 4 year-old systems that sell for the same price they were launched at. Radeon 7970’s (which is what these GPUs are) are hard to find retail anymore.
Ok, fine. The cheapest I found one was $307, most of the ones I saw were in the $350 range. But whatever, so subtract your $50. That is still $900 worth of components, before you even count a motherboard, case, power supply, and SSD.
Its obviously worth far more than $1000, even at cost. Come on…
Fine. $1,500. Still ridiculously overpriced.
But, this is typical for Apple gear. They come out with a killer product that is actually a fairly good deal when it’s released, but their product cycles are extremely long, and the tech gets a big outdated, but the price doesn’t change.
This is especially the case with the Pro. They simply don’t give a shit about them anymore. I mean, Apple managed to keep pro customers even when people were screaming “WTF?!” at them for still running OS9, but in some ways they’re well worse off…
There should be a refresh this year. Might even see fury based GPUs in it. But even with that it still won’t make most users happy. The GPUs alone are not the real problem imo.
The real problem is Apple either sells you laptop class non-upgradeable hardware (iMacs) or ultra highend server grade hardware (Pros) that is overkill for most users. They don’t offer a desktop machine at all…
I just want an iMac with 2 PCI-E slots
Non-upgradable server-grade hardware at that…
Not true. A Xeon E5-2697 capsule alone costs more than $1000.
BTW Mac Pro is not the point… Oculus’ ridiculous hardware requirements are the point.
Nevermind… let’s bash Apple!! YEAAAHHH!! xD
So sad that the Mac fanboys in here consider it OK that a $1000+ Mac comes with an outdated GPU. The Oculus Rift GPU requirement isn’t even that high..
I guess when you grow older, you will realize that people spend big $$ on something called workstations, and these beasts are called workstations instead of gamestations for a reason.
The reason being it lets CIOs approve overpriced hardware purchases?
Ah yes, the mythical “workstation”. As this entire thread is about Apple not having a computer with a proper graphics card, pointing out the Mac Pro has a powerful CPU or a GPU (relatively) good at double precision compute operations is kind of irrelevant.
If the Mac Pro is a “workstation”, which other Apple computer should I buy then to cover basic desktop graphics needs?
Seriously? mac mini or imac, take your pick. Those are basic desktops with more power than most people need. Yet, much less power than most games need. Most people don’t care about games, much less vr. I’m really interested to see what the uptake of any of these vr headests will be. I’m guessing it will be rather niche until there is some kind of a shakeout or standardization.
“Oculus’ ridiculous hardware requirements are the point.”
It’s only ridiculous if they abandon the idea that users probably don’t want to vomit due to the issues observed with laggy vr systems.
Seriously, if Apple support a decent graphics card, then they might pick up some of these kinds of market. There is simply no point compromising the experience – users will give up on VR if implementations are bad.
Even the $300 Kickstarter product needs a hefty GPU to render anything with quality. The real problem remains that there’s not a single Mac on sale with a decent GPU solution, and they have poor support for upgrades.
This isn’t even a new problem: back when I specced a PC for GTA IV, I looked into what I’d need to pay for a Mac capable of playing the game. I saved $1000+ by not going that route, and got a better computer, too.
It IS for the masses, it’s just that Apple doesn’t have any computers for the masses.
It’s not for the masses. Most PCs out there are not up to snuff to handle Oculus requirements either.
I assume that they’re saying that the $2500 “octa-core Xeon with two AMD FirePro” isn’t actually as powerful as the sub $1000 computer they recommend.
That I said, I agree that it is insane to require top-of-the-line $200+ GPUs just for “basic support”. VR’s screen resolutions are not that high anyway. It sounds a bit strange.
I believe it has to do with needing to guarantee that the framerate will never drop below a certain number because, on a VR display with head-tracking, such drops are much more noticeable than on a desktop PC and can also cause motion sickness.
Edited 2016-03-03 22:40 UTC
Yeap, I think exactly the same that’s the point.
Regarding Oculus bashing Apple… well they do it because it’s the cheapest way to get praise from hardcore PC fanboys.
Don’t forget Oculus is trying to sell a $700+ puke maker… only the most hardcore PC fanboys would pay that… so they speak directly to them. PR 101.
The fact that Apple has their own VR project may also be a reason why the Oculus mouth boy did what he usually does; run it.
It’s not just Oculus, Blender and LuxRender had troubles with Apple’s GPU support.
http://www.cgchannel.com/2015/05/open-source-3d-devs-criticise-appl…
This is a slightly different issue though, its not so much related to the hardware performance. Its more todo with poor OpenGL/OpenCL support and buggy drivers.
Edited 2016-03-03 22:10 UTC
For quite a while I have thought that Apple should have another version of the mac-mini offering mid-to-high end GPU options (say NVidia GTX 965(M) and above, Radeon R9 series) paired with Intel i5/i7 CPU option. This “beefier” mac-mini would have a not too much larger case to provide better cooling of the internal components. Price also matters.
This new box would be better for gaming, game programming, etc. when compared with current mac-mini.
I do not think the new non-Intel GPU iMacs could address the potential market targeted for this “beefier” mac-mini.
I dunno, I have a Core i5 Mac Mini (I think it was the cheapest 2011 version, it has thunderbolt, but no USB 3) and after swapping out the hard drive for a 1TB SSD, the performance is now exceptional. I need to put in 16GB of RAM, but even with 4GB (I think it came with 2GB, but I had spare RAM after a RAM swap at work) it is pretty good. I’ve run a bunch of games through Steam and all seem okay for what I care. But then I’m no desktop gamer, I prefer my XBox 360 every time.
These statements only show how ill is the gaming industry. It is insane that today’s gaming title requires current generation of video hardware. In a sane industry developers would target average CPUs and GPUs for medium settings, so that aging 5 years old desktop (which is still good enough for most tasks) would at least be able to run the product somehow.
For years now I am expecting to see new generation of game engines that would allow developers to scale their products nicely from old or low-end machines to shiny new gaming hardware that costs more then a used car. This would really be an important technical advancement that would turn the whole industry around.
Maybe my memory fails me, but back when I still played some computer games I never really had to care about minimum hardware requirements. Even though my hardware was quite modest at the time, every new game was enjoyable on my machine.
This isn’t a game we’re talking about, but brand new, crazy modern, untested technology. It’s really, really unfair to compare this to a game.
The reason it requires such high-end specs is that for the VR to work and not make people vomit and faint (literally!), it needs to power two ‘screens’ at high resolution with absolutely no dropped frames. And yes, that requires insane processing power.
Edited 2016-03-03 23:17 UTC
I don’t see any technical difference that would set VR apart from gaming. Both do exactly the same: programmatically construct stream of frames from 3D models, textures and 3D goo. The amount of framedrop depends on the complexity of models, sizes of textures and amounts of goo that is supposed to be displayed in a given period of time. The amount of vomit and fainting in both cases equally depends on framerate, framedrop, content of textures and set of goo. In both cases framedrop can be fixed by reducing level of detail. Equally, in both cases high hardware expectations do not indicate compexity of the task at hand, but rather developers’ attitude.
Edited 2016-03-04 00:00 UTC
…what?
Do you understand what virtual reality is referring to here?
I believe I do. Enlight me if you believe that different input and output mecahnics of headset bring some really fundamental changes to the 3D rendering technology, which actually sets the hardware requirements.
The demands are much higher. Only a very small number of people get mild motion sickness when playing regular games. In VR, that number is a lot higher – virtually everyone using [bad] VR suffers from it – making the demands that much higher; framedrops that would go by unnoticed in a regular game, can instantly make you dizzy and motion sick in VR. Combine that with VR headsets requiring not one, but two ‘displays’, as well as process a multitude of sensors, and there you go – stringent hardware requirements.
I belive you overestimate it quite a bit. I may be wrong but:
Now, this should be cheap in terms of computation. If any non-trivial computation is required here at all, it should be abstracted away in hardware or firmware.
Yes, that is exactly why it can’t run on Macs.
Also, you do know that Quake 3 is a 17 year old title by now, right? What’s next, that any computer than can run Elite from 1985 is ready for 3D?
It isn’t a change in the rendering tech, so much as a change in requirements:
1. You have to have a minimum framerate to prevent motion sickness issues that are relate to head tracking. Any delays in motion from head tracking movements, or inconsistent framerates will cause motion sickness and vomiting all over your shirt.
2. Resolutions are fairly high in order to look good on screens located just a couple inches from the eyes.
3. Wider field of views means more geometry needs to be processed, since not as much can be ignored and tossed out before rendering.
Human eye does poor job of detecting detail on the sides, so there is a lot of room for optimization. Note, Oculus is not just another set of screens – it is completely different output with its own SDK and runtime.
And again, while objective requirements of this device are higher then of common FHD screen, the most serious performance problem is basically the same: total complexity of models, total size of textures and total amount of 3D goo in the scene. I seriously doubt that well-optimized version of Quake III will have any problems running on Macs with Rift.
To which one would ask, why bother if you’re resorting to running extremely outdated software (or equivalent) just for the OSX version? Additionally the OpenGL in OSX is really bad in terms of performance. There is Metal, but here you’re asking developers to support an API for and extremely tiny userbase.
Edited 2016-03-04 03:06 UTC
You completely missed my point.
I mention Quake III because it is a sufficiently old game to run on every desktop computer currently in use. My point was that if it game developers were targetting common hardware (instead of latest generation), the progression from that old game to this day would not lead to situation when one needs top notch hardware to make use of VR headset.
So you did not really read my comment before answering, did you?
Okay, noted. So you think Oculus should settle for 17 years old graphics.
Yeah I suppose that if they did use 128×128 textures, static lightmap textures, no post processing filters and 5000 triangles in a scene (instead of a million today), then yeah, they *maybe* could meet the 75 hz minimum (not average!) requirement of head mounted displays. This of course assuming they have enough fill rate and compute power for the lens distortion shader required to make it all work.
Oh well, there goes my Mac Mini at least as it does’t even have that! Its GPU is such a sad story it cannot even run a 4K monitor at 60 hz.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing for here. Currently VR headsets don’t offer anyhere near the same FOV of typical human vision.
IF you’re arguing for lower resolution/detail rendering on edges, there is in fact research to this end. This called Foveated Rendering and there is no commercial (or soon to be) commercial hardware that can support it. Also there are no game engines that support this natively as they still make assumptions that display devices have uniform angular resolution.
Edited 2016-03-04 15:11 UTC
Yes, yes. Is this your way of advancing your argument against my statement that gaming software runs too much ahead of technology it builds upon?
I think you must be remembering a different era than I do. I began PC gaming with Ultima 7, Privateer, Wing Commander. Then Quake, Unreal, etc.
As I remember it my friends and I were upgrading our machines every year. Even with a Voodoo card Unreal was a horrible experience on a P166 so I had to bump to a P2 350. Then there were Voodoo 2 cards. Then Geforce 256. Matrox G200. Etc.
I just don’t recall an era of DOS or Win95 games that ran comfortably on anything 5 years old.
You think VR is a new untested tech, how cute.
The PC gaming industry has ALWAYS been about the latest and greatest. Running the latest PC games was always a struggle if you didn’t have the latest hardware.
Edited 2016-03-04 08:45 UTC
Yeah, I remember having to fiddle with autoexec.bat to run DOOM on my first PC. Model M keyboard was a great controller.
This is the same reason I don’t understand why Linux has 1900 games as suppoerted on Steam and OSX has 2900. The OpenGL is old, the hardware is overpriced, and they don’t have high end gaming gpus. Elite Dangerous was ported to the mac, but the expansion was not, because they don’t support the shaders that are required for the planetary landings. On the other hand, why Oculus is ignoring Linux when the users are more inclined to try out new technologies is beyond me.
Which Linux distros do you support, though? Fedora, Ubuntu/Debian, and derivatives?
Officially, Steam only supports Ubuntu. That said, it’s trivial to get it running on Gentoo, and it’s not all that difficult to do so on Fedora. I’ve heard it’s not too hard to get it running on Arch either. Debian is somewhat difficult due to their instance on ‘stability’, which really means they run old somewhat outdated software.
Running Steam on Debian is as easy as installing it from Debian’s repositories. Remember SteamOS was based on Debian, so it makes sense the Steam client would work on Debian with minimal fuss.
OpenGL is NOT old, you are either a troll or a moron. OpenGL is a specification that NO hardware can do by definition (or they have failed) as it defines wishes and demands of the gaming, movie and rendering community. If a card is 100% capable of doing everytyhing in even 1.0 then no CPU is needed. To be compliant is another matter, and most are.
Vulcan has already won the developers minds and directz lost, ports to mac, linux, android, playstation and nintendo devices has won.
DX will be an afterthought and ports seems unlikely considering the xbox sales numbers.
The previous poster was clearly referring to the fact that the OpenGL implementation in OS is old.
Presumably, it is a numbers game. Mac users are regularly castigated on this and other websites for overpaying for what they get. This would suggest that they are more inclined to open their wallets.
Didn’t Tim Cook say that the new Ipad Pro will replace the PC for many people?
Apple killed off their gaming division on Mac’s long time ago. Instead they focus it on the professional market.
I’m pretty sure VR will come with Apple at some point as well, but not in the Mac/OSX department, just tightly integrated in iOS.
It’s a high end device that needs quite a lot of graphics power to run right, especially with the level of quality and immersion they want games running on it to have. In addition Apple hasn’t got good graphics cards in their machines NOR up to date drivers for said devices. Their current max OpenGL version is OpenGL 4.1, a version that was standardised in 2010. It may be a bit of a stretch to call Mac’s not “good computers” but from the point of view of someone that works with graphics for a living it’s completely understandable. Apple have ignored that entire industry, and this is just the industry showing that that has hurt their prospects of getting new technologies like this.
VR and PC gaming — i really don’t care. never have never will. it’s like the comic-con crowd is all thats left. 90’s throwbacks with massive loud machines with wires hanging out of them, multiple fans screaming, and some sad existence inside of a game world while they sit there wasting their human bodies away.
most people i know that even play games want to get off their PC/Mac that they have to use all day for work, they don’t want to sit on the same type of machine and play games, get interrupted by all the notifications, have your work staring at you. xbox and ps4 are in almost every house it seems.
i personally have never seen anyone over 30 who would proudly call themselves a “gamer” and wants these big beasts of PC’s sitting around. they sound like air conditioners.
just my opinion of course. i play lots of madden and some grand theft auto, and some of the indie games on PS4, but i really could give 0 shits about gamer culture or the hottest new video card. it’s all a distraction from the shit your life is, just admit it.
Please don’t use ad hominem attacks like that. It invites people to attack you for being “that kind of person” whose idea of gaming is sports games and GTA rather than holding a constructive discussion.
i’m including myself in the slam. when i have something better to do, someone to visit, something to make, something to do, i don’t play video games. i don’t even think about them.
video games are useless distraction when you can’t bother to do anything else. relaxation at best, although most aren’t that relaxing. blowing off steam maybe.
i used a smart car to drive down the boardwalk last night, smushing nearly a hundred people before a helicopter shot my tires out and i crashed into the ocean and died. then i was respawned to go do it again. trying with a city bus this time.
gaming.
people who spend real money inside of a game? f’in crazy.
i just think of all the billions of cycles, billions of minutes, of generally intelligent people sitting inside of a video game world and it makes me sad.
a real challenge would be to work on cleaner power sources.
battery technology.
hell, cure a disease instead of playing games.
maybe in the future they will develop games that leave a positive impact on society. right now it’s murder/violence, and general stupidity.
i am part of that, just a bit, and i’m calling it for what it is. a huge time waster. we each get to decide how to spend that 24 per day.
In that case, it would have been better to say
Without non-verbal cues, you really need that extra cue that you’re making a general, self-inclusive statement rather than talking down to others.
fair enough, i’m on the fence.
i play probably 5-10 hrs of madden per week.
maybe 1 hour more per week on other games with wife.
so i don’t think i’m a hardcore gamer, it’s just what i do before falling asleep some nights.
i worry that i could play more than that. that i’d ignore my other hobbies, family, friends, arts, the outside world, randomness.
i’ve known lots of people that do play more than me. not all of them are outcasts, but many are, shall we say, challenged by the real world. i mean we all are but some of us feel more guilty about games i guess.
who knows, i can’t clarify my thoughts on it. i have been playing video games my entire life but i keep a certain distance from/respect for their power. you can just forget life and play that fake game instead.
btw i threw for 470 yds and 6 touchdowns in the super bowl the other week. won by 33 points. such a major accomplishment and typing this was about the only real buzz it gave me.
I love Apple’s computers and use them for everything but gaming. That being said Apple’s computers lack the graphics power you would get from building a good gaming rig. That doesn’t mean those are bad or not good computers. They just don’t server that type of market.
the expensive, under performing, over hyped Apple computers aren’t up to snuff for the expensive, under performing, over hyped Oculus VR gizmo.
News at 11.
All things considered, I don’t think you can fault Oculus too much here.
They are attempting to make an advanced technology mainstream.
And while computers have been able to render 3D graphics on a head-set since the late 80’s, having low latency and a high minimum frame-rate are going to push up the specs (assuming you care about the REALITY part of VR).
If they entered the market by giving a mediocre (or nausea inducing) experience… it wouldn’t be well received. Further if they started out supporting low-end graphics… it also wouldn’t be so appealing.
So – as with many new technologies – the first version will push the specs, some people will grumble, a year or 2 later computers will either support it… or VR will remain a technology for a minority of users.
And Oculus really _are_ putting the bar too high WRT hardware specs – let the market sort it out, I’m sure there will be lower end competition eventually.
Edited 2016-03-04 22:47 UTC
Right, Oculus can make a Samsung phone do VR without a problem in the GearVR product.
But a Mac won’t do?
If a phone can do VR, then so can a Mac Mini.
The Oculus is far more sophisticated and powerful than the Gear VR.
There is not really that much to the Oculus. Most of the heavy lifting is done by the PC.
Having had experienced VR systems before, the Oculus really is not that impressive or significant. Their main value proposition was supposed to be the low cost of entry, and they haven’t even been able to deliver on that front. It’s the never overhyped startup.