Windows 7 and above only? Ugh..
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/...
[Anyone still on winxp is a dangerous maniac, and I sincerely hope that's not what the OP meant.]
Of course it's won't happen in few days, but it's will certainly appear before official support.
A more likely option is to run the Oculus server process in Wine, and this is something we're actively looking at. (If you're a game/VR dev and interested in doing Real Work to support the Rift or Vive on Linux through Wine, send me a mail.)
2) Even if you could get around the above, I would strongly recommend against running the Oculus on underspecced hardware. It won't just look worse -- if your framerate is low enough the judder will make you physically sick.
As for Linux, comparatively tiny market, but one I imagine they'll go after eventually. Has anyone announced plans for a VR-capable Steam Machine?
EDIT: For reference on the Mac Pro, note that it has not been updated since the first release of the black "trash can" version in late 2013.
This is basically a non-starter until the video driver situation on Linux gets resolved.
The core of the problem is that AMD/Nvidia only produce optimized drivers for their cards for Windows (and presumably the consoles who source from them). Those optimizations provide such a significant speed boost (~30-40% in real-world usage) that trying to do VR without them is going to be difficult, at least until the first few generations of VR drive demand for exponentially more powerful video cards. Of course, the drivers are optimized over the course of years by tweaking them to work with specific games, so until there are more games being released on Linux, they won't get the opportunity to optimize the drivers.
So it's a chicken-and-egg problem: the drivers aren't optimized because there aren't any games, there aren't any games because there is no demand, and there's no demand because the performance sucks and the driver situation is hella confusing. Valve is trying to work on the demand/supply side with SteamOS, but everyone on both sides is kinda hesitant unless the driver situation gets resolved.
Right now, Steam Machines are just a convenient way to order a gaming PC without a Windows license. Everyone I know who has bought one ended up installing Windows on it within the first week and just running it in Big Picture mode.
For instance Nvidia proprietary driver without any special optimizations can easily achieve 50-80% of Windows performance depend on game in Wine which translates D3D9 API calls into OpenGL.
There is also Gallium3D Nine state tracker that usable on AMD open source drivers which is implement D3D9 natively on Linux. It's can easily achieve 80-95% performance in some cases and this is with very limited number of developers.
It's true many games underperform in Linux, and I don't play the latest AAA games, so that helps. Still, many games are very playable. I've played and enjoyed Portal 2, L4D2, Insurgency, and of course many platformers and indie games on Linux, so the situation isn't that dire. I own a large collection of Linux games from Steam, Humble Bundle and GOG.
It's possible Linux is still not ready for the Oculus, but it's not hard to use it as a gaming platform either. I repeat, the situation is not that dire.
Well, that's why I said Linux is 3-5 years behind Windows rather than say it's impossible to game on Linux (which obviously is not true!)
VR systems like the Oculus are going to remain a AAA feature for some time to come, though. You know how AAA games usually don't have a Linux port, or if they do it's a year later? This will be like that.
IMO the way to look at the Oculus is as a $2000 console. It's first-generation tech, which means it will eventually get better and cheaper, but for now it's only for the people willing to pay early adopter prices.
IIRC the actual rendering resolution is even higher than the screen's so that it can go through its distortion for optics to a final image without upscaling anything, so consider me very skeptical of an integrated GPU handling it satisfactorily.
I say this as the owner of a 2011 MacBook Air (Intel HD 3000), which definitely can't maintain 60 FPS in modern games at its native 1440x900 resolution (half the pixels of a Rift) even with the other settings turned all the way down.
But as a user I'd at least like the OPTION of running Rift against my Mac.
Not at all, but it's not what was popular last 10 years for many reasons and with Vulkan it's already legacy API.
Here's a lengthier discussion about it: https://forums.khronos.org/showthread.php/9717-Will-Vulkan-e...
It's clearly deprecate it in case of games and even more in the case of VR since you need high-end hardware that all support Vulkan.
For other games and low/middle-end hardware you simply don't want to use OpenGL for cross-platform game since it's total mess on Windows thanks for Intel, AMD and Microsoft. So it's only usable on Linux / OS X and this is why PC game developers don't use it.
Well you could do that, but the higher-level graphics APIs use fundamentally different abstractions which need to be awkwardly translated into a format that the GPU expects.
If you put an OpenGL wrapper on top of Vulkan, you lose most of the performance benefits.