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.

The result, the company says, is that systems capable of running modern VR games at just 45 frames per second can now display a VR-acceptable 90 frames per second on the Rift headset itself. That means the official lower limit for an "Oculus Ready" system is now an Intel i3-6100 (or AMD FX4350) and an Nvidia GTX 960 (or Radeon RX 470), down from the Intel i5-4590 and Nvidia GTX 970 that Oculus initially recommended back in 2015.

In October, Oculus promised that a $499 PC would be able to meet those reduced specs, and the CyberPowerPC tower being sold at Best Buy starting this week fulfills that promise. It's a pretty good deal for that level of computing power, too—building a similarly specced system from individual parts would cost close to $550, according to PC Price Picker.

While we have yet to see the Rift itself offered for less than its $600 MSRP, we have seen a few other deals on the VR hardware. Best Buy offered a $100 gift card and a copy of Eve: Valkyrie with the headset over the holidays, and it offered a $150 gift card separately earlier this month. Those kinds of deals can go a long way toward paying for the $200 Oculus Touch hand-tracking controllers that are really required to get the most out of the Rift.

The "all-in," entry-level price for VR gaming on the Rift is still pretty high compared to that of the PlayStation VR headset, which you can get along with the needed PlayStation 4 for less than $800. But as Moore's Law continues to bring hardware prices down, and as software optimization perhaps continues to smooth out VR's rough edges, the price to experience VR on a PC will continue to become more and more competitive.