Apple might have a lot of things going for it, but support for the Oculus Rift isn’t one of them. When asked if the Rift would ever grace the Mac, Oculus’ Palmer Luckey didn’t beat around the bush.
Speaking with Shacknews’ Daniel Perez, Luckey had the following to say when queried over the Rift’s future with Apple’s hardware:
“That is up to Apple. If they ever release a good computer, we will do it.”
OK, now before you get too fired up, Luckey elaborated on exactly what “good” means:
“It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs. You can buy a $6000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn’t match our recommended specs.”
According to Oculus, the recommend specs demand an “NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290”. Although not Oculus-approved, the FirePro D700 is apparently good enough, going from benchmarks.
Still, the man does have a point. The majority of Apple’s current desktop line-up sports Intel GPUs and while Intel has picked up its graphics game significantly over the years, the hardware just won’t cut it when it comes to powering the Rift.