If you’re one of the large majority of PC gamers who took one look at the system requirements for virtual reality and decided it just wasn’t for you, then take heart from the words of Valve’s Alex Vlachos, who said during a presentation at GDC last week that Valve is "trying to reduce the cost of VR."

The biggest stumbling block for most is the small matter of a GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 290 graphics card. Despite being two of the most popular GPUs on the market neither comes particularly cheap. Vlachos addressed this at GDC, saying "We’ve said the recommended spec is a 970, the same as Oculus, but we do want lesser GPUs to work."

As for just what lesser GPUs he’s referring to, well Vlachos claims he can run the Aperture VR test demo on a GeForce GTX 680 without dropping a frame while at a lower graphics quality. That is to say you might have to take a hit on the graphical quality but there’s no real reason why lesser hardware can’t take advantage of VR.

“For me, that’s enough of a proof of concept,” said Vlachos “Most art we’re seeing in VR isn’t as dense as that. So we should be pretty good to go…everything should be able to support that low-end hardware. But we need the right safety nets in place.”

He’s undoubtedly right as well. Most of the launch titles for both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive aren’t particularly demanding visually. Take Job Simulator 2050 or Lucky’s tale as chief examples; this pair you would imagine could comfortably run at 90Hz with tweaked settings on a lesser hardware than a GeForce GTX 970.

Vlachos also mentions a new rendering plug-in which is coming to the Unity engine soon. This is essentially designed from the ground up for VR and will reduce the load on the GPU. That’s only one engine of course, but we’re seeing pleasing advances in VR support across the board which should help ensure better performance for PC gamers.

Are any GD’ers who don’t meet the minimum requirements for virtual reality still braving a pre-order? If Valve could lower the system specs would this make VR more appealing to you? As always let us know your thoughts below!