Oculus Rift system requirements lowered thanks to new tech

The system requirements for the Oculus Rift have been lowered, making VR a little cheaper as a result.

Previously the Oculus required an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card or better, an Intel i5-4590 CPU or better, and a minimum of 8GB of RAM.

However the new system requirements are significantly lower, only calling for an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon RX 470 graphics card or better and an Intel i3-6100 or AMD FX 4350 processor or better. 8GB of RAM is still required. The trade off here is that Windows 7 support has been dropped, meaning the Oculus now requires Windows 8 or newer.

A quick bit of research shows that you can realistically build a decent PC that meets these specs for around the 500 mark, making VR a lot more affordable than previously.

The change is thanks to some new tech that is being implemented into the Oculus. Asynchronous Spacewarp, which is the best name for any piece of tech ever, allows Oculus content to run at 45 FPS on the PC itself but still display at 90FPS in the headset, by using some space wizardry to make new frames or something. Obviously this won’t be quite as effective as the proper 90FPS output that Oculus has used thus far, but opening up the VR ecosystem to those on a tighter budget is surely a good idea.