Company Macs Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), they are not recognized for the very high processing power they offer, but neither for the extraordinary graphic performance, and this costs the owners the opportunity to buy a helmet for virtual reality like Oculus Rift.
In a recent interview, the founder Oculus VR, Palmer Luckey, said that although the company he runs has intended to make its virtual reality software compatible with Apple Macs, they don't have graphics cards powerful enough to support it.
Palmer Luckey said that the ball is in Apple's court and only they could offer users the possibility to run software for virtual reality, the company recommending graphics cards NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290.
Even the most expensive Mac Pros don't have graphics cards powerful enough for the system requirements of the software they run on Oculus Rift, so that the only solution for those who want to buy this system is to buy a powerful PC.
On the raw rendering costs: 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.
Considering that virtual reality is starting to become more and more interesting for users, those from Apple will certainly be criticized by many people who will not be able to enjoy these systems on insufficiently performing Macs.
Of course, Apple could offer the option to buy more powerful graphics cards with the Mac Pro, but it is extremely unlikely that the cards for MacBook or iMac will soon provide the processing power needed for a virtual reality software.
