You can get Skyrim VR running on a GT 1030, apparently

Virtual reality gaming is an expensive hobby. The best VR headset, the Oculus Rift, is $400, and to run the latest games you've got to shell out hundreds more for a VR-ready graphics card.

Or, you can try to fudge it. That's what YouTuber LowSpecGamer did, setting out to play some of the best VR games for as little money as he could. For starters, he swerved the Rift and the HTC Vive to pick up a refurbished Windows Mixed Reality headset for $160. Then, he assembled his PC, combining parts he'd picked up for cheap with some that viewers had donated. At its core was an i5-2500K, and it had 8GB of RAM.

The graphics card was where it got really interesting. He knew he could get games working with the GTX 1050 Ti he had in his laptop, so he dialed it all the way back to the GT 1030, the least powerful card in NVidia's GeForce 10 series.

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By playing around with Windows settings, he managed to get Skyrim VR running with the system. I mean, it doesn't look great, but it's running nonetheless.

I'd recommend watching the whole video, in which he tries other games—including Superhot VR and Fallout 4 VR—with a variety of graphics cards. It didn't make me want to rush out and immediately recreate his setup, but it's interesting to see how far a limited budget will take you.

And if this just gives you a hankering for Skyrim, sans-VR, make sure to play with our guide to the best Skyrim mods.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.