SAN JOSE—When Oculus first announced the minimum PC specs for the Oculus Rift, the headset needed an Nvidia GTX 970 equivalent and an Intel i5-4590 to run acceptably. Now without changing the hardware, Oculus has used a new software API called "asynchronous spacewarp" to officially lower that recommended spec. Today, Oculus says the Rift will run acceptably on any machine with an Nvidia 960 or greater and an intel i3-6100 (or AMD FX4350) or greater.

The key to that change, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe says, is a new "asychronous spacewarp" technology built into the Oculus API. Much like the Oculus' existing "asyncrhonous timewarp" technology (which Iribe says eliminates almost all of the 11 percent of frames that would otherwise be dropped in VR), Iribe says "spacewarp" allows games to run at an internal 45 frames per second while still providing a smooth 90 frames per second to the headset.

The spacewarp system (which is built into the Oculus runtime) takes the two previous frames generated by software, analyzes the difference, and calculates a spatial transformation that can generate a "synthetic frame" based on the current head translation and movement. While Iribe was clear that this synthetic frame system is still "no replacement for native 90 hz rendering," it does fill in the frame rate gaps on systems that are not able to hit that framerate natively.

Hence, the Oculus Rift officially supports PC hardware that's less powerful than it did before. That includes a new $499 Oculus Ready PC from CyberPowerPC and AMD. Oculus is also certifying four Oculus-ready laptops from the likes of ASUS, Alienware, Lenovo, Aorus. Iribe promised that, within a few years, there will be hundreds of laptops that meet that Oculus Ready spec. For now, though, Iribe said "PC VR is more affordable than ever.