Today in a blog post, Atman Binstock; chief architect and technical director for the Rift, dropped the skinny on what kind of hardware you are going to need in order to get what he called “the full Rift experience”. And fair warning, it is not for the faint of heart, there are going to be a LOT of people looking to upgrade in order to play games properly on the Rift. So without further ado, here are the recommended specs to get “the full Rift experience”

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• 8GB+ RAM
• Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output (required)
• 2x USB 3.0 ports (required)
• Windows 7 SP1 or newer (required)

Like I said, not for the fair not heart as those are some fairly steep requirements, and we imagine that a lot of people will be looking to upgrade some hardware over the next 6-10 months before the Rift is released.

They also went on to say that they are going to be using those specs over the “lifetime of the Rift”, and as time goes on, naturally that hardware or the equivalent will come down in price. They are using this as a standard so that “Developers, in turn, can rely on Rift users having these modern machines, allowing them to optimize their game for a known target, simplifying development.”
He also went on to explain some of the resolution and latency details of the consumer model;

A traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering.

You can read the whole, very detailed blog post over here.

Still no word on the pricing for the Rift when it is released sometime in Q1 of next year, but it is great to start seeing more details trickle out.

By Dayne “Anjel” Cody
Twitter- @DayneCody