Following the announcement in September that Facebook will discontinue the Rift product line in 2021, it appears the company is gearing up for a final sendoff by offering its latest PC VR headset, Oculus Rift S, for just $300.

Facebook launched Oculus Rift S back in March 2019 for $400, a price point built to appeal to consumers looking for a relatively cheap, relatively high-quality VR device, not to mention access to the platform’s exclusive titles such as Asgard’s Wrath (2019) and the Vader Immortal trilogy.

Created in partnership with Lenovo, Rift S was a step back in many ways from the original 2016-era Rift, but also a welcome jump forward in both display resolution and room-scale tracking. With no need for external sensors and a pair of tracked motion controllers already in the box, the only thing you need to get up and running is a computer capable of playing its games and apps. We also listed the minimum specs below, although you’d do better with a flagship GPU from at least 2018 onwards.

Photo by Road to VR

Due to the company’s recent choice to shelve its iconic Rift product line, you probably won’t be seeing many more Rift exclusives coming down the pipeline as a result though. Thankfully, Rift S is also compatible with SteamVR, meaning your options for PC VR content are practically unlimited. Games not on the Oculus Store like Half-Life: Alyx (2019), No Man’s Sky (2016), and Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) are all playable on Rift S through Steam.

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Granted, anyone using an Oculus product for the first time must connect a Facebook account, a controversial move that has landed the company in hot water both with enthusiasts the world over, and regulatory agencies in Europe. Still, at $300 it makes Rift S one of the cheapest modern PC VR headsets out there.

You can find this deal through official online retailers such as Oculus.com, Amazon, Best Buy, and NewEgg. It likely won’t get cheaper than this before Rift S is discontinued in 2021 and stock dries up completely.

What’s in the box?

  • Oculus Rift S headset
  • Oculus Touch controllers (2)
  • Headset cable
  • AA batteries (2)
  • Mini DisplayPort adapter

Minimum Specs

  • Graphics Card – NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti / AMD Radeon RX 470 or greater
  • Alternative Graphics Card – NVIDIA GTX 960 / AMD Radeon R9 290 or greater
  • CPU – Intel i3-6100 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200, FX4350 or greater
  • Memory – 8GB+ RAM
  • Video Output – DisplayPortTM 1.2 / Mini DisplayPort (with adapter included in the box)
  • USB Ports – 1x USB 3.0 port
  • OS – Windows 10

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Check out our full review of Rift S to learn all about what makes it tick.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • wheeler

    Any bets on how many more years the Oculus PCVR platform has before it’s shuttered?

    • As many years as the legal battle stretches on for

    • shadow9d9

      As long as games are produced that they want their storefront to sell.

    • Amni3D

      I think they’re already done. They made a public statement that the Rift line is discontinued, which you typically don’t do if you’re gonna support the platform with software. I think they realized people are only buying Rifts to access SteamVR. And rather than competing, they just pulled out.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Well, they always said the Quest would be their main headset from the moment it hit the shelves, well even before that, as they already outsourced the Rift S to Lenovo, which essentially is just a Lenovo headset with Oculus branded on it, I don’t think much of that headset was designed at Oculus/Facebook..
        Personally I think it’s a good choice in the long run as even the mobile headsets are capable of running PCVR through a thethered line or wireless.. The moment I can shed the cable of my HTC Vive Pro I’ll do it, but at this time the wireless module is waaaaaaaaaaaay to expensive, you can almost buy a complete Quest 2 for the same price (at least last time I Checked).

        • BARRETT

          Jacobs, you’re always defending Facebook. Lol, shut the fuck up already, and….aren’t you a little too OLD to be playing video games you silly OLD FART?.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            a I guess you’re a child, can’t even write my name right, can’t even be a little bit decent.. And playing video games is for all ages…

          • Dick Massive

            No, he’s right. Every time Facebook are mentioned on this site, there you are defending them. Do you have a picture of Zuch in your living room ?

          • Andrew Jakobs

            I’m just being realistic.. And I’m certainly not defending them on all points, but if Apple can do what they do (although now they also get more hassle from governments), why shouldn’t facebook also be able to do it?

          • CURTROCK

            Ignore the FB haters. His name says it all. The Quest 2 ROCKS!

          • CURTROCK

            Yeah, just as you are there attacking FB on this and other VR websites EVERY time they are mentioned. You must also have a pic in your living room. (or perhaps bdrm) :)

        • Amni3D

          I think it would be an all around good choice, but their insistence on not bothering with a native display port/ hdmi out implies to me PC is meant to get a back seat *from now on*. The encoding and decoding overhead implies Quest Link is not a priority feature as it shouldn’t exist in the first place. In addition to never wanting to touch the wireless tethering capability the device has unless the homebrew community successfully pressures them into doing so.

          I think they view PC support for Quest a necessary bargaining chip but not much more. Ultimately we’ll have to see though.

    • Jonathan Winters III

      True – but they will still fund PC VR game development, as PC graphics bling helps to sell the headsets, even if it is a small percentage of Quest owners.

    • Bob

      Won’t happen anytime soon until Facebook can get their priority product, which is the Quest lineup, to deliver experiences that are on par (or close to) with what you can get on the PC. Merging both platforms too soon would be a potential chaotic disaster for the Oculus ecosystem and surely anyone with common sense would understand why this would be the case.

      How many years? Depends on how fast they can get their R&D from labs to production which specifically points to their method of approach on high fidelity graphics processing: Cloud streaming OR local processing.
      Currently it isn’t immediately clear on how Facebook intends to solve this problem of enabling “PC fidelity-like” content on standalone devices as quickly as realistically possible since Facebook Reality Labs likely have teams working on both approaches.

      We know they have patents on both cloud steaming and various technologies such as eye tracking, and foveated rendering which help to drastically uplift local processing. We also know that their number one priority in the labs right now, and where the majority of their resources are focused at, is obviously eye tracking because solving that in its entirety would essentially solve mostly everything else such as varifocal, which FRL is currently obsessed with, and then foveated rendering. So around the time you see the next Quest being announced, which includes these technologies to open up PC-like VR experiences to the masses, will be the same time the Rift platform will be shuttered and merged with the Quest platform. Give or take two years in my opinion.

    • psuedonymous

      CV1 was discontinued min 2019, and continues to be supported for every Rift PC release to date. And will continue to be, as that’s the entire point of the Rift platform specs (and the reason why Rift S did not implement anything platform-breaking like freeform hand tracking). The continued utility of the Rift platform for game and technology development even independent of Quest entirely (i.e. even ignoring that you can connect a Quest to a PC with Link) makes the continued existence of the Rift platform useful.

  • Amni3D

    I mean, fixed IPD slider and mandatory Facebook launcher is still a tough sell at $299, to be honest. I can see this dropping in price on the used market a year from now once budget HMDs roll out again anyway, assuming this is still competitive.

    • Kevin White

      And LCD and lower-resolution controller haptics and somewhat limited controller tracking.

    • Bob

      A very tough sell especially taking into consideration you have a newer and more updated product out there for the same price which doubles as a standalone headset.

  • Inside out tracking is way worse than CV1 + 3 trackers tracking, what jump forward?

    it’s only the setup that’s easier (but with a specific play space you just set it up once).

    • TechPassion

      Oh man.I used Odyssey+ for years, with inside out tracking and had super precise tracking in everything. It is a total bulshit what frustrated Oculus/Vive/Index owners spread across the Internet. Inside out tracking is 99% perfect and good for all games you can imagine. ZERO sense to drill walls for base stations. So, stop your bs.

      • Kevin White

        Oh man. That was definitely not my experience with the Odyssey, AT ALL.

        It’s funny that using a drill is seen as some sort of heavy demand. I’ll use my buddy’s setup as an example. Installing the base stations was a ~20 minute process completed in early April of 2016 and they have worked flawlessly for over 56 months. How is that some kind of big ask?

        • Arno van Wingerde

          Well, those holes and tracking cameras may be a problem for some, e.g. in the living room. A larger problem is not being able to take your VR set with you and simply play along elsewhere, say during Xmas visits. I love my Quest2 and do not have problems with tracking, but I am pushing 60 and not particularly sportive: I suspect that my Quest 2 has less trouble tracking my abrupt moves as I have actually making them….

          • Kevin White

            Portability is nice now and then, I’ll agree with that. But over the years my buddy has shown VR (Vive Pro wireless for the past couple of years) to many dozens of people, probably into the hundreds now, so it hasn’t seemed a problem. Back when I had my Vive I had a bunch of friends and family over to play in my dedicated space.

            We had at least 60 holes in our living room and with the amount of crap my wife had up on the walls, she didn’t have much room to talk about relatively tiny base stations. My play area kind of bordered the living room and into the dining area (it was one giant room in that house — living, kitchen, dining). Now we have a house with a huge gameroom, much like my friend’s house.

            Quest 2 and Rift S are definitely better with controller tracking than the Odyssey was (just the number and spread of cameras — 5 or 6 vs. 2 — makes that evident, plus the software just seems more solid than Windows MR).

      • Prime example of people you shouldn’t listen to because they’re wrong and want their toys to be the best at everything even when they aren’t. Nowhere did I say inside out tracking sets aren’t worth getting but no, it’s not just users of old sets that make these claims, every single properly technical review out there (from people who get everything for free so have no reason to care one way or another) says the same. They also say Oculus inside out tracking is miles better than WMR, because it is, but that doesn’t satisfy you either, no, Odyssey, Reverb G2, etc., have all perfect tracking just because your ignorant butt says so, lol.

        • Gato Satanista

          Quest 2 Link cable works fine for me. No clearly visible compression artifacts or lag. I got an CV1 and a Rift S too. The only thing that bothers me on Quest 2 is the LCD black levels.

    • nejihiashi88

      I agree oculus rift tracking is much Better, smoother and lower miss tracking, quest 2 needs more cameras and higher quality with higher HZ.

    • Dick Massive

      You’re a fool. Enjoy your dated VR.

  • TechPassion

    Rift S = you need to invest in quality headphones which raises the price a lot. You can buy Samsung Odyssey+ for this money and its tons, tons better. Mechanical IPD, OLED panel, built-in very good audio headphones. Anti-screen door tech, but image is super sharp. Rift S is like cheapest WMR headset from 2017.

    • Cybis Z

      I used to own an Odyssey+. It dug into your face and was painful to wear. The lenses were godawful and always blurry everywhere except in the absolute dead center. IPD adjustment is worthless if your personal IPD is even slightly asymmetrical. OLED was nice, but it was visually a lower resolution than even a Rift-S (each “pixel” in a pentile display is actually only 2/3rs of a pixel – it’s missing either the red or the blue component) but placed far higher demands on your GPU. The pentile display combined with anti-SDE tech made everything fuzzy. It was not sharp at all.

      On top of that, the O+’s controllers were bulky and awkward, and the tracking volume was horribly small (albeit the controllers tracked will *inside* that volume).

      Did they ever fix the inability to throw things in WMR?

  • Wild Dog

    Of course they want to start cleaning stock, has anyone noticed the quest exclusives?

  • It’s a very good offering for people that use PCVR more than standalone one. The Rift S is much more comfortable than the Quest

  • oomph

    I want nreal specs
    NOW

  • Arno van Wingerde

    Hm… never mind the Rift S, but why is it so awfully difficult to produce a “perfect” VR set?
    Just to pick a combination i would like: optics of the Reverb G2, but with OLED if possible for the best blacks same (or higher) resolution, controls and inside-out tracking of the Quest 2 but option for base stations, Elite Quest band, but with springs, reverb G2 earphones etc. wireless connection to PC. Of course some people will prefer some other combination, but this is what would make me happy. Altogether I love my Quest 2, certainly at the price, but for instance black levels are absolutely awful – to the point where you can almost forget about horror games!
    It’s not that the technology isn’t there, or that a combination of all good things would somehow work out to be too expensive, it’s more that every manufacturer seems to almost deliberately puts in a terrible flaw or two into their design.

    • Gato Satanista

      Yes…for me, the most stupid flaws of Quest 2 are the ridiculous strap and the awful black levels. I buyed a cheap (in my country the Elite Strap has abusive price) strap from China and got way more confort than using the default straps.

  • Ragbone

    Whats wrong with using 2 empty halves of coconuts and putting a hole in them?