http://www.tomsguide.com/us/oculus-rift-hardware-requirements,news-20934.html
Oculus VR has released the list of hardware requirements for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset (which goes on sale in early 2016, price unknown). And that list is a doozey — ruling out all but the latest hardware, which, by Oculus VR's own admission, excludes virtually all current laptops on the market. Oculus is also focusing on Windows development, leaving Mac and Linux users hanging for the time being. In a post on the Oculus VR blog, technical director Atman Binstock makes clear why the hardware requirements are so demanding. "… rendering techniques and quality matter more than ever before, as things that are imperceivable on a traditional monitor suddenly make all the difference when experienced in VR," he wrote.
In short, he says, rendering smooth images on the Oculus Rift requires 3x the graphics power as required for showing a normal 1080p video — moving up to 400 million shaded pixels per second, vs. 124 million for regular 1080p video.And dropped video frames, which are hard to notice on a 2D screen, are painfully obvious in VR.
These are the specific requirements:
NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
8GB+ RAM
Windows 7 SP1 or newer
2x USB 3.0 ports
HDMI 1.3 video output (297MHz clock) via a direct output architecture