The Oculus Rift has recommended system requirements

The consumer version of the Oculus Rift is on its way at the start of next year but Virtual Reality is going to be quite hard to drive. As a result, like with most games these days, the rift comes with a set of recommended PC specifications in order for you to get the “full Rift experience”.

Those looking to game on an Oculus Rift should have an Nvidia GTX 970 or an AMD R9 290 GPU to power graphics, an Intel Core i5 4690 or greater and at least 8GB of RAM. You'll need two USB ports to hook the headset up and you will want to be running Windows 7 or later.

According to the Oculus blog post, all applications are going to be optimized for this level of hardware to ensure a good experience: “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 optimise and tune their game for a known specification, consistently achieving presence and simplifying development.”

The final version of the Oculus Rift will run a 2160×1200 display at 90Hz, the blog post goes in to a bit more detail, stating that in order to optimally drive the Rift, you will need three times the GPU power used for 1080p gaming. Since today's laptops can't really do that, the Oculus Rift will not support them.

Mac and Linux users are being put on hold for now while Oculus focuses on bringing VR to Windows. So far, a price for the Rift has not been announced but we are expecting the first game reveals to take place at E3 this year.

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KitGuru Says: The Oculus Rift needs high resolutions for pixel density and a high refresh rate to offer a good virtual reality experience, so it isn't surprising that a fairly strong PC is required to make the most of it. Are any of you looking forward to the Oculus Rift? Is your rig VR ready? 

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