It's an Apple kind of month, and it seems appropriate to follow my posts about The 101 and the Mac mini with some impressions about VR and the Mac Pro.
It has transpired that the founder of Oculus claims that they'd build Oculus Rift for the Mac "if Apple built good computers."
That's a pretty extreme troll, and I think that that phrasing was chosen specifically. I'm on file as absolutely loving my Windows based OptiPlexes and ThinkPads, but not because "Apple can't build a good computer."
At the core of the discussion is that Apple's Mac Pro 4k video editing workstation "can't" run VR. Though, this is misleading. First, what it can't do is high resolution, high refresh Oculus Rift gaming. Secondly: The original Rift development kit had hardware that the Mac Pro (and some Mac Pros) should have been capable of running.
The biggest problem may be that the Rift prioritizes gaming above all else, and as far as I know, there literally aren't any real "professional" applications for it yet. (Despite what you may see on discussion forums and comments sections about the issue.) This is especially relevant as a lot of people supporting this position are talking about it from the perspective of using the Mac Pro as a professional VR workstation, somehow magically assigning it the capable to reasonably run VR
To me, there's a few things going on here:
- A core misunderstanding about what the Mac Pro is
- The misconception that Apple has ever tried to build an enthusiast or gaming computer
- A massive over-estimation in the viability of VR in professional applications at this time
People continue to get caught up on the limitations of the current Mac Pro. It is a very different machine from the one Apple introduced ten years ago, in 2006, as a follow-on to the Power Macintosh G5 in 2003, which itself isn't conceptually any different from a Power Macintosh G4 from 1999 or a G3 from 1998. Those aren't even very different from a Macintosh Quadra or II from the early 1990s.
Apple's high end systems have always been workstation aspirational, and the current Mac Pro, introduced in 2013, is the first one they've officially put the label on. However, most of Apple's modular computers over the years haven't been particularly high end. They're premium products, but they're midrange computers at best.
As such, either because Apple couldn't or didn't want to or perhaps had no way of knowing what people needed, they left a fair amount of expansion in their products. Want a RAID controller? Put it in a PCI slot. Bought the Power Macintosh G4 for QuarkXPress on the eve of the introduction of the Power Macintosh G5? Throw in some cheap USB 2.0 and SATA cards.
Many notable workstation computers had some but not much expansion. Typically, a workstation was built with a purpose or some range of purposes in mind, and it came equipped with the expansion capabilities (often proprietary) equipped to make those particular tasks better. In general, your expansion choices were going to come directly from the manufacturer of your machine, and they involved either networking (FDDI, Fiber Gigabit Ethernet), faster storage (better or more SCSI, FibreChannel) or HPC interconnects (HIPPI, InfiniBand) or things like audio/video in and output hardware.
Workstations were available with different mixes though. Highly expandable systems were a lot more common in the realm of the PC workstation. Some systems like the Compaq Professional Workstation 700 featured up to nine slots, in addition to whatever they had onboard, which often included their Ethernet controller, USB, and sometimes niceties like their primary SCSI controller, Firewire, and sound.
Although the old Mac Pro is essentially patterned after high end PC workstations, with dual sockets, lots of generic standardized expansion slots, and a lot of internal disk bays, the new Mac Pro is patterned after video/3d/technical UNIX RISC workstations of yore. Most of those were designed with a specific band of tasks in mind. You could often choose from a range of different graphics cards, but in general, only the really low end systems that needed basic unaccelerated framebuffer ("UNIX chores boxes") or 2D acceleration (light CAD work) were going to use any kind of standard slot, and those (older Macs included) often required cards with special firmware and drivers written by the system vendor. In some cases (Sun in particular) the cards were sold under a special name or label, to position it within that family's products, but to avoid comparisons with gamer-focused PC hardware.
From the perspective of drawing pixels on a headset, there's nothing very special about VR. The biggest problem is that gaming vendors are targeting a specific level of performance to create a good gaming experience. There's nothing stopping something with a video card good enough to play 4k video with effects into a pair of VR goggles, potentially making Final Cut Pro with VR features well positioned to edit video or other multimedia experiences for VR devices such as Google Cardboard or the ViewMaster.
There's a lot of talk about how Apple's missing out on using the Mac Pro for VR applications, but I think the real problem is that there just aren't any professional VR applications, and many of the ones that might exist don't strictly need to have the performance levels that 3d gaming does. I also think that people are reasonably massively misunderstanding the potential utility of VR in professional applications. I think what it's going to come down is viewing pre-rendered static content (which should be doable on literally anything from the past ten years or so) and editing said video content. On the 3d side of things, you can do some modeling, but I doubt that interfaces will get good enough to supplant normal monitors for normal work, and even on small normal displays, real-time performance isn't always very good, nor is it necessarily critical to the work.
I think, though, that you'll be able to see Oculus do well rendering low-resolution preview of situations, or you'll see 3d workstations get better at that kind of performance. It's something that likely very few workstations are going to be good at today. The only real saving grace of a system like a big HP Z, Dell Precision, or Lenovo ThinkStation compared to the Mac Pro, for this task, is that you can order those systems without a graphics card (or with a basic 2D card such as a Quadro NVS) and then replace that card with an appropriate gamer card.
But really: why not just buy a gamer system? At this point, VR is a gamer task that's optimized for gamer hardware, and you can buy a gaming PC set up to do VR gaming (including the Oculus) for less than what workstation graphics cards that are capable of the task will cost.
Just to repeat that: You can buy an entire computer with the Rift included for less than the cost of an nVidia Quadro or AMD FirePro that will do VR. Heck, the new AMD Radeon Pro Duo is essentially two Fiji Radeon cores and it costs $1,499. 3D workstation costs cost more than that. The Quadro M4000 is a $770 upgrade on a system like the HP Z620 workstation. Quadro M5000 is an $1,870 upgrade and the M6000 is about a $4,370 upgrade.
Should any professional applications outside of game development tools ever show up for the Rift, it'll be far enough in the future that any system, a Mac or a PC, will need hardware upgrades in order to run them. If you want to run VR today, you should probably just suck it up and buy a Windows computer. The $1,499 Asus computer and the $1,599 Dell system are both going to be capable systems, both for VR and for just about anything else.
Until professional VR applications do come up, the existing Mac Pro is still one of the best 4k video editing workstations on the market.