Oculus Rift Oculus VR/Facebook

The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset will require a powerful computer to run the VR experiences consumers will have in 2016 - and no, your MacBook Pro won't do.

Facebook-owned Oculus VR released a list of technical requirements for the Oculus Rift on Friday, as follows:

  • NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
  • Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
  • 8GB+ RAM
  • Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
  • 2x USB 3.0 ports
  • Windows 7 SP1 or newer

If that all looks like Latin to you, we're here to break it down: you need a relatively expensive computer with a beefy graphics card. Currently, the graphics card alone is around $300.

The long and short is this: If you were to build this computer right now, it'd cost around $1,000.

More simply put for you Apple fans out there: No, Oculus Rift isn't going to work with your MacBook Air (and probably not your Macbook Pro).

But there's some good news! Given the ongoing march of progress, the cost of the technology required to run the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift will assuredly drop before the first quarter of 2016. But if you're running on an older computer, especially a laptop, you'll probably be out of luck for the first-generation Rift.