Don’t look now, but “Oculus Ready” PCs are getting relatively cheap

Back when Oculus first launched the Rift VR headset almost a year ago, buying the headset and a minimum-specced computer that could actually power it would run you at least $1,500. Now, the "entry-level" price for PC-tethered virtual reality is already down to $1,100 as part of a new bundle deal.

As Radeon recently announced, CyberPowerPC's "Gamer Ultra VR" tower is now available in a Best Buy bundle with an Oculus Rift headset for just under $1,100 (or $500 for the PC and $600 for the Rift itself). Even without the bundle deal, the tower itself is selling for only $650, the cheapest price we've seen for a pre-built PC that's officially marked as "Oculus Ready."

Part of that price reduction since early 2016 is the normal march of technology making CPUs and GPUs cheaper as they get older. But a bigger part of the change is Oculus' "asynchronous spacewarp" technology, which the company announced in October as a way to calculate a spatial transformation that can fill in missing frames on lower-end hardware.