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Comment by spdustin | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure I'm deeply in the minority here, but I still wish PCVR (or a native headset/driver) worked on Mac. My MBP's graphics are beefy enough to handle the sort of games or experiences I'd want to enjoy in VR.

I had the DK2 when Mac was still supported, and even my old MacBook Air could drive it well enough to enable some pretty enjoyable experiences from third parties writing for it. The solar system tour in particular was a favorite of mine.

Granted, it's not a hardcore gamer-friendly setup, but there was still a lot to enjoy, and even develop for.

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> My MBP's graphics are beefy enough to handle the sort of games or experiences I'd want to enjoy in VR.

As a fellow Mac user, I highly doubt it's the case anymore unless you're going to limit yourself to Beat Saber.

1. Most games are not optimized for the Mac to put it lightly.

2. Mobile GPUs just don't cut it when you're running VR and displaying on 2-3 screens at once

You really don't have a choice but to either go with Facebook or Steam PC for VR, for now at least. Who knows when Apple will risk it with another potential paradigm shift, but if they're still going with the 'just glasses' Jony Ive route, it will be years.

> 2. Mobile GPUs just don't cut it when you're running VR and displaying on 2-3 screens at once

The Oculus Quest has been doing VR acceptably on mobile _phone_ GPUs for 15 months.

A recent Mac laptop's GPU should be able to handle at least as good an experience as the Quest.

The Oculus Quest has games that directly target it on its on platform. Most Steam VR games expect a PC with a reasonably, powerful GPU. Macs don't even run Nvidia GPUs

Most of Apple leadership just doesn't care enough about games. Sure they care a lot more now, but imo still not enough at the detriment of the Mac line. imo Jony Ive placed too much of an emphasis on form instead of function for AR / VR. If Mike Rockwell won the internal politics at Apple for his separate VR hub, maybe we'd have well supported VR for Mac by now... but nope.

I see what you mean. Good point. Thanks!

Completely agreed, I was happy to see steamVR beta for mac but it never progressed beyond a beta and I have to boot to bootcamp every time I want to play VR games. I have an egpu which is more than beefy enough for a good experience but it sucks that I can't actually use it in macos.

It does show that if Apple switches to arm, the value proposition will be significantly reduced since I will have to have a separate PC for gaming and testing things on windows.

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