Oculus has detailed the PC specs it recommends for the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, and it's a Windows-only device for the moment.

“Presence is the first level of magic for great VR experiences: the unmistakable feeling that you’ve been teleported somewhere new,” said the company.

“Comfortable, sustained presence requires a combination of the proper VR hardware, the right content, and an appropriate system.”

The recommended specs:

◆ 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

“The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration,” said the company.

“Ultimately, we believe this will be fundamental to VR’s success, as developers can optimize and tune their game for a known specification, consistently achieving presence and simplifying development.”

In a separate blog post, Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock expanded on the need for that level of gear.

“There are three key VR graphics challenges to note: raw rendering costs, real-time performance, and latency,” he wrote.

“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.”

He also addressed the Windows-only portion of the announcement.

"Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows," he wrote.

"We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux, but we don’t have a timeline."