The Rift’s Recommended Spec

Presence is the first level of magic for great VR experiences: the unmistakable feeling that you’ve been teleported somewhere new. Comfortable, sustained presence requires a combination of the proper VR hardware, the right content, and an appropriate system.

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

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

All of the games and applications for the Rift created by Oculus will provide an incredible experience on this system.

Binstock, Oculus chief architect, wrote a detailed technical post outlining the recommended system specification and the reasoning behind it, along with more Rift details, here: “Powering the Rift”.

Oculus PC SDK 0.6.0 Released

The Oculus PC SDK 0.6.0 is now available on the Oculus Developer Center. You can download it here.

0.6.0 includes the following major changes:

Compositor service

Layers

Removal of application-based distortion rendering

Simplification of the API

The compositor service moves distortion rendering from the application to the OVRServer process. This is an architectural change that enables features like layers and other performance and quality improvements in the future.

Layer support allows an application to send multiple independent render targets to the compositor. For example, you might render the heads-up display, background, and game space each to their own separate layer. Each layer can have a different size, resolution, and update rate, which can be used to improve performance and rendering quality, particularly around text.

The API simplification is a major step toward v1.0 including removing support for application-based distortion rendering.

You can read the full release notes for 0.6.0 here.

Mobile VR Jam 2015 – Community Voting Now Open

Over the last month, hundreds of teams from around the world have dedicated themselves to bringing their virtual reality ideas to life for the Mobile VR Jam 2015. On Monday, over 300 teams submitted their final build for Milestone 4. Now, these VR Jam games, applications, and experiences are ready for community voting!

If you have a Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition, you can visit the ChallengePost submission pages, download the builds, and experience them for yourself. Let us know what you think by voting on your favorites!

If you’re interested in learning how to register to vote on ChallengePost, or next steps for VR Jam 2015, you can check out the latest update here.

Oculus Dev Blog – Squeezing Performance Out of Your Unity Gear VR Game

Chris Pruett, Oculus partner relations engineer, discusses methods for optimizing game performance on Gear VR in his post, “Squeezing Performance out of your Unity Gear VR Game”.

A sample frame from Unity with about 30,000 polygons and requires 40 draw calls

In part 1, Chris covers details of Gear VR, the runtime environment, and rendering techniques to improve performance. Part 2 will discuss how to go about debugging real-world performance problems.

More news to come in the run-up to E3.

— The Oculus team