Oculus Quest

Oculus Quest. It’s a cool step forward, no doubt: an all-in-one headset, with touch controllers, inside-out 6DOF tracking, no sensors, no wires, headphones and so on. Neat! I can’t wait to put my hands on it… but, there’s a but:

“It runs rift quality experiences”, that’s Zuckerberg’s words. And they’re twice wrong.

Rift device runs tethered to a PC, which is a x86 architecture based machine. The Quest will be running on a Snapdragon 8xx processor, which is a mobile processor, SoC architecture. There’s no way to compare the mobile architecture’s processing capabilities with the x86 one and its way more powerful CPUs / GPUs – roughly speaking, one focuses on power consumption while the other on performance.

So, no “rift quality” into Quest.

The other thing is that the OS, drivers and graphics libraries are different on each architecture, so say your latest shader feature will be different on each architecture and, in principle the same binary application won’t be able to run on both. In other words, this means that you will need to tell the 3D artist and the programmer to work the application out again… and they will get really mad at you! :)

Therefore, Oculus Quest won’t “run rift” existing apps and games either. They will need to be re-built.