I'm wondering can I run oculus rift or other VRs using my 2012 mid macbook with gtx 970 eGPU or upcoming razer blade stealth w/ razer core with gtx 970 in it
3 Answers
According to the minimum specs on the Oculus Rift website, that graphics card is the minimum required. Looking at the CPU specs of the Razer Blade Stealth, the CPU (an Intel i7-6500U) appears to be powerful enough to satisfy the minimum CPU specs of the device.
That said, Thunderbolt 3 will only provide a PCI-e x4 lane to work with, whereas graphics cards (such as the GTX 970) can support up to x16 for maximum bandwidth. The loss of bandwidth available over the Thunderbolt 3 connection in practice usually isn't terribly significant. However, we do not know how much this will impact the Oculus Rift's performance, since it has yet to be released and reviewed in its retail configuration. Given, though, that some performance impact may occur, and the uniqueness of the Rift's demands on the graphics card (driving two displays--one per eye, rather than one monolithic display), it might be problematic at least for that graphics card, as it is only the minimum recommended.
A definitive answer to this question isn't possible right now, though, until someone tries it out and sees. So for now, I'd say it is possible, but it might not work quite as well as you might hope.
answered Mar 10, 2016 at 22:44
My setup is an Oculus Rift and Touch with a Nvidia 1080GTX EGPU via thunderbolt 2, connected to a 2013 Maxed out 15 inch Macbook Retina in Windows 10 Dualboot.
Everything runs near flawless framerates. It works great except for Nvidia's buggy EGPU support and new driver issues. They seem to have broken EGPU support in their recent drivers.
From a recent Palmer Luckey interview it doesn't sound like Mac support is in the cards any time soon: http://www.shacknews.com/article/93547/oculus-palmer-luckey-will-consider-mac-support-if-apple-ever-releases-a-good-computer
