Oculus Rift and the future of gaming

Oculus Rift and the future of gaming.

2015-05-16  As the gamer of the future comes closer and closer to the future Neon, there are very few signs of the gaming systems to be evolving. One hint that made gamers skip a heart beat happened  yesterday when Oculus (OCLS) made public the specs required for their Oculus Rift. As a professional gamer and software engineer the specs did seem in the middle range price, although the specs might not be met by many PCs out there, many others especially serious gamers are ready for a plug-and-play product. 

According to Atman Binstock, Chief Architech at Oculus the gaming set will require;

- NVIDIA GTX970 : 

   Cost :  $360

   Cores Quantity : 1664

   Boost Clock : 1178 Mhz

   Base Clock : 150 Mhz

   Memory Speed : 7.0 GBps

   Power Requirement(TDP) : 145 W

   Standard Memory Config : 4 GB

   Memory Interface : GDDR5

   Memory Bandwidth : 256 b

   Max Digital Res : 5120x3200 Pixels

   Max VGA Res : 2048x1536 Pixels

   Display Connectors : Dual Link DVI-I, HDMI 2.0, 3x DisplayPort 1.2

- or AMD 290:

   Cost : $399

   Cores Quantity : 2560

   GPU Clock : 947 Mhz

   Memory Speed : 7.0 GBps

   Power Requirement(TDP) : 275 W

   Standard Memory Config : 4096 MB

   Memory Interface : GDDR5

   Memory Bandwidth : 320 GB/s

   Memory Bus : 512 bit

   Memory Clock : 1250 Mhz

   Max Digital Res : 5760x1080 Pixels

   Display Connectors : Dual DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort

 - Intel i5 - 490 :

   Price : $ 202

   Cache : 5 GT/s

   Instruction Set : 64 bit

   Core Quantity : 4

   Base Frequency : 3.3 Ghz

   TDP : 84 W

   Memory Size : 32 GB

   Memory Types : DDR3/DDR3L

   Memory Bandwidth : 25.6 GB/s

   Graphics Video Max : 1.7 GB

- 8GB+ RAM

- Windows 7 SP1 or newer

- 2x USB 3.0 ports

- HDMI 1.3 video output supporting 297 Mhz clock via direct output architecture

   As we see above the requirements for this new gaming system are fair, of course this is if the Rift actually works as promised. Now a days mostly of the PC gamers own a computer with these specs, therefore this specs are mid-range gaming system specs. As a gamer I would love to put my hands on this toy, although there many features which Oculus seems to be working on or they have solved, ie. scaling of 3D room, depth, latency, resolution suited for human eye, etc., there are many other features which worry my enginerd side, as how much wearable can this be, how are players going to wear this headsets for hours without feeling the instrument on the head, is the distance between eye and screen safe for eye health, how will we be able to type without seen the keyboard, etc..

   This new system is to be launched in Q1 of 2016, and we just cannot wait to see if this is a hit or fail. This is supposed to be the great and long awaited gaming systems of the future, the take over of the virtual reality world not just gaming systems. If all works well I seriously believe that this will be the PlayStation and XBox killer. Even though Oculus does not specify the sound system they will be using either for the microphone or the spearkers if any, the HMD(head-mounted-device) is said to sport a microphone, let's cross fingers and hope we get a good quality devices. If this HMD systems are a success, the gaming is just the beginning of the VR-world.