I am briefly wondering what an interesting VR setup would cost me. Let's say a baseline of "play Beat Sabre" and "watch myself dance around in VRChat wearing a cool avatar that I might have made myself".
I've only got a Mac so any PC involved would be part of the setup cost along with the headset/controls/trackers.
@anthracite Cheapest would be a Quest which is standalone at a couple hundred bucks. but involves Facebook.
VRChat Quest limitations and PC specs
@anthracite @kistaro @Doephin watercool all the things
VRChat Quest limitations and PC specs
@Doephin @anthracite
Note that relatively few furry VRChat avatars are designed to work on the Quest standalone client, although the number is increasing. The Quest (with PC link) is probably still the most reasonable option for a cheap headset but, yeah, the cost of a PC is waiting behind it.
VRChat is not very good at using multiple cores, so prioritize a CPU with single-core speed over a high core count. You probably want an NVidia GTX 1080 or better. userbenchmark.net suggests that the cheapest card in this category is the AMD RX6600-XT. The NVidia GTX 1080-TI is a reasonable upgrade pick (about 25% higher performance). Nothing else is in a similar price tier according to the listings on userbenchark; top-end graphics cards can outperform the 1080 by 3:1 but this honestly won't help much in VRChat, you'll get a reasonable resolution at 90fps with dips to 45fps (with reasonably good frame interpolation covering over it) with the 1080 (base).
If you want more power than you need with the expectation that demands will grow and you'd like to keep meeting them, Nvidia RTX 4070 costs slightly less than twice as much and pushes slightly less than twice as many frames per second (holding all else constant). There's nothing between that and the absurd tier of pricing, with marginal improvements in performance; with two outliers at the stupidly top end. the RTX 4070 appears to be the best price:FPS ratio right now.
uh, summary:
* VRChat Quest is very limited compared to VRChat PC
* VRChat's primary performance bottleneck is single core CPU; graphical performance is a surprisingly distant second. Performance is fine on a several-year-old used-to-be-top-end graphics card, which is now solidly in the "budget" range, although you can get a higher rendering resolution (with stable framerate) out of a better card.
* userbenchmark.net suggests the only real options are AMD RX6600-XT (cheapest adequate), NVidia GTX 1080-TI (similar price-to-performance ratio, about 25% faster), and Nvidia RTX 4070 (similar price-to-performance ratio, double performance). Nothing in the "expensive" tier has an even remotely similar price:performance ratio; the only thing that's close is literally the most expensive card on the market.
* Because VRChat is single-core-performance constrained and sustained CPU performance is heat-constrained, get a liquid cooling block.