IMac Support

[Logie1010]

Greetings, 

I have a son who is praying Santa will bring him an HTC Vive system however mom & dad are an all Mac household. Our newest Mac is an iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2017) 3 GHz Intel Core i5 8 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 Radeon Pro 555 2048 MB. Is this enough horsepower to run the system? 

Thanks, 

A father trying not to disappoint his son. 

[lopez2018]

I would be very wearry of purchading a headset for use with a Mac.  As a dad in the same situation, I have not been able to set up our HTC vive with iMac having the same specs as yours.  we were using a MSI gaming Laptop, but the video card was not very good and we were getting poor frames per minute.

 

there are several youtubes that seem to set up the Vive with Mac Book Pro and External GPU. The relation with Apple is just to new and you can't even generate an error report when the Vive is hooked up to the iMac, which they would need to help you troubleshoot any issues.  

 

Basically, its currently the wild west when it comes to using HTC Vive with Imac.  

 

If you do feed adventurous and proceed, make sure you get an AMD external video card, NVIDEA may not yet support Mac.  Or make sure you have an HDMI port on your iMac and the Radeon Pro 555 can support VR gaming.  we have a Radeon RX 580 External GPU

 

Good luck,  my son is kind of bumed about the Mac not working with the Vive, but he accepts the current state of affairs.

[HackPerception]

, adding on - At this time Vive is not officially fully supported on Mac hardware and it is currently considered a developer device within that ecosystem.

 

While the HMD may function on some Mac hardware, the larger issue you'll encounter as someone who would be a content end user is that only a handful of developers have published Mac compatible binaries of their experiences. This means that there is a very very limited number of experiences you'd be able to launch within MacOS. 

 

We'll contiune to work towards MacOS support of Vive, but as of this post, I cannot recommend you purchase a Vive given your use case.