Oculus has announced a new standalone VR headset called Oculus Quest. Oculus Quest is an all-in-one VR gaming system, meaning that – and contrary to Oculus Rift – you won’t need a PC system in order to play its VR titles. And according to John Carmack, this system is as powerful as the last-gen consoles, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
At Oculus Connect 5, Carmack stated that in terms of raw power, Oculus Quest is in the neighbourhood of the power of the previous generation of consoles like PS3 and X360. However, and while the Oculus Quest is in raw power as powerful as those consoles, its games will not look as good as the games that came out on these consoles.
In case you weren’t aware of, for VR games a PC – or in this case Oculus Quest – has to render the game twice. Not only that, but in order to avoid any motion sickness developers will have to develop games that will run at 72fps. So while the PS3 and X360 were pushing some impressive stuff back in the day, they were rendering their games at 1280×720 at 30fps. On the other hand, John Carmack claims that the Oculus Quest will be rendering games at 1280×1280 twice at 72fps with 4XMSAA (which is eight and a half times more pixels than you would have on an Xbox 360 game).
This basically explains why the Oculus Quest games are not looking as hot as the game that came out on last-gen consoles. Still, the Oculus Quest will have more texture memory and main memory, so developers may be able to use higher quality textures in order to hide some graphical shortcomings.
So yeah, while the Oculus Quest is as powerful as PS3 and Xbox 360, you should not expect a game looking as good as Metal Gear Solid 4 or Gears of War 3.
You can find John Carmack’s full keynote below.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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