Mac Pro 2013 and CV1?

[oz42]

Now, I know I am going to get shot down in flames for trying and told it can't be done but when has that ever stopped us?!

I am hoping that someone might be able to help me past the final hurdle;

I indulged when Oculus had their summer sale and got myself a CV1! Trouble is I have a Mac Pro 2013 (trash can) with dual AMD Fire Pro D500's. I'm running bootcamp under Windows 10 x64 Anniversary Edition (1604) and am hoping I can get it working...

My first trick was actually updating the GPU drivers as Apple, in their infinite wisdom, seem to have not updated the Windows AMD driver for a couple of years! (if it an't broke, don't fix it, I guess?) Mat at bootcampdrivers.com has plenty of help and after having issues with his latest drivers (many BSOD's!), I managed to get Crimson 17.5.2 to work.

I plugged in my CV1 and whilst initially recognising the HDMI and USB on the headset, once I plugged the sensors in, the HDMI became unrecognised by the Oculus App! So, not only can I not progress through the Oculus setup and calibration procedure, the Oculus App does not think the headset is attached.

Interestingly, the headset does actually show a desktop and behaves as an extended monitor! I get sound and picture but the Oculus App does not think the HDMI is attached!

I am so close to playing Elite in glorious VR. Any ideas to get me past this last (of many!) hurdles, would be greatly appreciated!

o7

 

[Verlaine]

The Rift needs the right USB 3.0 chipset. What chipset does also MacPro have?

Either way, your biggest hurdle will be the graphics card. The D500 offers 2.2 TFLOPs of throughput, while the RX 470 — Oculus' minimum specked GPU for the Rift — offers more than twice as much throughput with 4.9 TFLOPs.

Even if you get a USB 3.0 add-on card with the right chipset, I'm doubtful the D500 will work with the Rift.

But good luck!

 

[Exigeous]

VR doesn't support SLI so you'd be using a single Fire Pro which isn't close to powerful enough for VR. I'm 90% sure Oculus Home won't even install on that setup as it's not close to the minimums. My very high end desktop PC from 3 years ago needed some beefy upgrades, namely a GTX1080 and I get "good" performance, not Ultra/etc.

In short it won't work and if you can get it to install/run it'll be horrible.

Good luck though....

 

[[VR] Frank_G]

I am a Mac User as well. I considerd a lot of things to make my Mac VR ready, when the Rift CV1was announced. In the end i built a PC and pre-ordered the Rift. Back then, the build had more graphic power than my Mac could ever have and i recently updated to a GeForce GTX1080ti to make it even more powerful.

I still use my Mac for work and will continue to use Macs for that, but for VR, building a PC was the one and only right decision in my opinion. Even the latest announced iMac Pro will not have the performance, a high end PC with a 1080ti delivers for half the price. Apple really took a nap, when it comes to decent gaming.

[edit] Where are my manners - Good luck and i really hope you get it running. Elite in VR is really incredible. And welcome to the world of VR. 2D was yesterday and there is no going back

 

[oz42]

Thanks guys (and gals?) for the advice. I know it's an uphill struggle but I'm not giving up yet!

I just wanted to find out if anyone had already achieved this and could offer advice.

I'll keep going and if I succeed, I'll let you know...

 

[TorTorden_VR]

Thanks guys (and gals?) for the advice. I know it's an uphill struggle but I'm not giving up yet!

I just wanted to find out if anyone had already achieved this and could offer advice.

I'll keep going and if I succeed, I'll let you know...

Problem is.
We are currently at the very threshold of what works for vr. And any subpar experience are likely to make physically ill from using it.

You might be better off getting a used gamer pc with something like a 980ti etc in it.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

I'd have expected it to work running windows under bootcamp, albeit with poor performance.

What's that hdmi port connected to? If you have a displayport->hdmi plug maybe try all the displayport connectors.

 

[Kizbot]

The Rift needs the right USB 3.0 chipset. What chipset does also MacPro have?

Either way, your biggest hurdle will be the graphics card. The D500 offers 2.2 TFLOPs of throughput, while the RX 470 — Oculus' minimum specked GPU for the Rift — offers more than twice as much throughput with 4.9 TFLOPs.

Even if you get a USB 3.0 add-on card with the right chipset, I'm doubtful the D500 will work with the Rift.

But good luck!

As Verlaine puts it, Your biggest hurdle here is hardware not software or drivers.

I'm going to be that guy that just out right says it. Lets have a reality check. I say this only to save you a headache.

It's not going to work. You may waste a lot of time trying to get all the software finally installed and working but you are hugely under estimating the importance of having enough processing power to get VR to work. When the Rift was released, min spec was a GFX card with a processing power of at least ~4,600 GFLOPS (namely the GTX 980). VR doesn't support SLi/crossfire so you will only be using a single D500 which sadly only has a processing performance of ~2,200 GFLOPS. No amount of wishful thinking or determination is going to make that single D500 run more than 100% faster than it's current maximum...

If you do manage to get your gfx card working at 210% power then please do lets us all know how you did it. I think we would all be keen to know how this is achieved!

Save yourself a lot of headache and get a PC upgrade. You are just wasting time until you do and all the while your statement of

I am so close to playing Elite in glorious VR.

is nothing but day dreaming.
Elite + all the other fantastic VR games are worth it! Upgrade that rig to a PC with at least a GTX 980 and put that wonderful Rift to good use!

I'd have expected it to work running windows under bootcamp, albeit with poor performance.

What's that hdmi port connected to? If you have a displayport->hdmi plug maybe try all the displayport connectors.

It just won't work. The hardware is not capable.

 

[Exigeous]

+1 - this, oh so much this.

I'm all for hacking away at something to cobble something together for fun. I don't think this is the place to do that. VR is still very young and even when things are ideal it can be far from perfect. Hell even products like the PiMax 4K still suck and they are $500 products. As has been said the issue here is hardware - in short your video card is not nearly, not even close, to powerful enough to support VR. If you did get it to even work, and I'm bet a large sum of money you won't, the experience and framerate would be so bad that it would be completely unplayable.

With a 4770k i7, 64GB RAM, RAID0 SSD and a GTX 1080 I run at around medium to medium-high settings. To get a perfect 90 fps all the time I have to run at lowest settings, and that's on a supported and very modern computer. A potato video card, and that's what you have in comparison, just isn't gonna cut it.

Save yourself the headache and just wait until you can afford proper VR. Oh and remember Apple hates you, they just want to force you into upgrading every year when you don't really need it and get very little from it.

 

[Frank]

I have to mirror what Frank_G said. You have set yourself an arduous task, and wish you all the best of luck.

Of course the easiest path is to go for a Wintel gaming box, but what about Apple themselves? The new iPhone shows they are waking up to AR. Is it possible that they my have some sort of graphics upgrade and maybe even a VR helmet hidden up their wizards' sleeves?

 

[TorTorden_VR]

I have to mirror what Frank_G said. You have set yourself an arduous task, and wish you all the best of luck.

Of course the easiest path is to go for a Wintel gaming box, but what about Apple themselves? The new iPhone shows they are waking up to AR. Is it possible that they my have some sort of graphics upgrade and maybe even a VR helmet hidden up their wizards' sleeves?

They, as in Apple, would have to wake up to a decade's worth of GPU advancement first, and they have far more work to do for VR research, a topic they have themselves completely ignored up until now.

If they where considering anything in the VR\AR space, first I would expect Apple to do was to perhaps buy out someone, Fove would come to mind.
They might try for some phone based Vr, but I doubt it, in the desktop\laptop section of the market they are just too overpriced and too far behind graphically to even consider it.

 

[Khyrios]

Hi!

Had a Mac Pro with D500 and tried it my first weeks with the CV1... after this i bought a PC with a 980ti ( 1080 wasn´t released back then )...
There were two main problems:
- Crossfire didn´t work in Elite - it was usable with a single gpu, but after playing on the 980ti I never wanted back...
- original AMD´s driver install was a real pain, because many times this driver did not recognized the GPU correctly resulting in some instabilites. The Apple driver back then was way behind...

With the Apple driver I had no problems with my CV1, but the framerate was just awful.
I think the AMD driver causes all your problems.

Maybe you can do something with a external GPU´s. But after reading experiences from people doing this with Macbook Pro´s this is not smooth sailing...

So today I own a PC for Gaming and a Macbook Pro with an Ultrafine display for my work stuff...

 

[[VR] Frank_G]

I dug really deep into what Khyrios suggested and yes, i can confirm, that it is not a smooth sail. Back then, there was already a lot of performance loss, even with Thunderbolt II as a connection and using GTX 970 and 980 GPUs.
Also you need to buy a case, a power supply and a board to plug your GPUs into... The costs summed up to half of what a full PC would cost - without performance loss, driver troubles and the risk, that it would not run at all...
After that, i decided to go for a full PC.