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Comment by Arzh | Hacker News Reader

I'm still surprised how many people are mad about the OSX ditch. They think they need a high-end gaming video card, which Apple doesn't support. Apple has never cared about making Macs machines that play games. Why would you want to be on a platform that doesn't care about what you want to do on it?

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I think most people are upset because (like me) I was developing away on my MacBook Pro with the DK2 and it runs excellently. There has never been any talk in the past that support would be halted.

I was just hacking for fun, but a bunch of people are already in the middle of creating products and games and have a lot invested. The anger comes from the about-face, coupled with a loss in time/money investment.

Seems like reasonable thing to be mad about - I'm surprised you're surprised by it.

Eh, not so much. As a dev kit user, you should be aware that (a) the DK2 a far cry from Crescent Bay, which is much closer to what Oculus plans to go to market with and (b) that a display of Crescent Bay's caliber needs a lot more power than what's in an average MBP to offer a proper experience of Presence.

Seriously, if you didn't see a high-powered spec coming, you may want to reconsider your ambitions as a VR dev. If a current Mac Pro could accommodate a Nvidia 970/80, expecting Apple support would be one thing. But in the absence of a system that can support cards like these, what were people expecting?

I mean, Oculus has said over and over (and over and over) that their biggest fear is re-launching VR with a less-than-mindblowing level of quality and getting a negative to lukewarm response as a result. "Conversion on contact" is what they say they're after.

Your MBP + DK2 may offer a fun and easy way to familiarize yourself with the platform, but it's nowhere close to what's called for by the experience they've been promising to bring to market.

The good news is that they're saying the setup they've specified - though currently quite expensive - isn't going to change anytime during the life of the product. In other words, the only thing that will change is the price of this setup, which should be considerably lower by the time sets start shipping in 1Q16, and sales really get going later in the year.

Yeah that does seem annoying, but if you are only targeting one of those platforms the likely hood that you would succeed is super small. I'm not just talking about Occulas when I talk about being on a platform that doesn't care. I'm also talking about the game developers, unless you are making an iOS game I don't see why you would ever want to develop for or play games on a Mac.

Then why not support Linux? Apple devs are used to working around esoteric hardware requirements, they're upset about not getting software support.

Regardless of Oculus's sensible reasons for pursuing a one-platform strategy, you're talking about independent devs who have spent months or years building on a beta SDK only to be left hanging in the final runup to release. I'm confused why you're surprised.

I'm guessing Linux will be a very small % of the overall Rift demographic. It might not make sense for them to spend resources on supporting 1% (NB: random guesstimate) of the user base just yet, although I'm sure that'll happen eventually.

To be clear, that was a rhetorical question :) My point is just that "underpowered GPUs" is not the reason OS X is getting dropped[], focus on a single platform is.

[] If you're still not convinced, let me point out that Oculus supports Android with a separate SDK.

Isn't the Oculus Android SDK just for the Samsung Gear?

Yeah, it's a separate technology stack, with its own dev team, not directly comparable to the Rift SDK. But that's a bit of a red herring, since the Galaxy S6 at 1440p is actually pushing more pixels to the display than the Rift, per frame. (But at a lower framerate, of course.)

And John Carmack is working on it, and he probably doesn't care as much about OS X. Again, my point is that the constraint here is not the GPU, but Oculus engineering resources.

Also let's not forget there are something like 300mil Android devices out there, whereas Linux is around 1% of desktop user base: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system... It absolutely makes sense for them to focus on Android (regardless of their partnership with Samsung)

I can only say that you've definitely found one here. I'll be moving fully to xubuntu once my windows 7 box goes EOL. I'm not willing to invest in what will surely be an ~ecosystem~ when I know it does not fit my long term plans.

I guess because I don't know a single game developer that actually likes making games on Linux. I like linux, I use it for server and web programming, but it is god awful to try and make games on.

The Mac Pro does in fact have a good enough graphics card. But that market is so small I guess they feel it's not worth it.

Kinda. It's OK for simpler stuff such as Windlands, but a "flagship" game like Elite: Dangerous isn't really pleasant to play. This is from my experience using a top of the line Mac Pro booting windows 8.1.

Serious question: Did you mean to say "MacBook Pro"? Or are the dual GPUs in the Mac Pro severely overpriced?

(I don't keep up with the advances in graphics cards)

I really did mean the Mac Pro! I've also done VR on a MacBook Pro and that's obviously much worse even than the Mac Pro.

VR doesn't work well with SLI right now, many people end up disabling all but one GPU in a multi GPU setup.

The GPUs in the Mac pro aren't strictly optimized for putting triangles on the screen.

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