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Comment by lwneal | Hacker News Reader

The Oculus/Meta Quest 2 runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2. That chip's GPU, the Adreno 650, has a pixel fill rate of 14 GP/s. Compare this to a GPU like the NVidia RTX 3090, which has a fill rate of 190 GP/s.

Lighting, textures, transparency, and many of the effects that make things look good in modern games, at the resolution and framerate required for smooth VR, can't currently be done on a $400 headset.

At least in terms of the cartoonish graphics, it seems to me like a case of "fast, cheap, good, pick two".

[1] https://chipguider.com/?gpu=adreno-650-645-mhz

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090...

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A quick look on Wikipedia[0] shows that 14 GP/s is bad, but really not that bad. It's not like games from 10 years ago when that kind of fill rate was common all looked this bad. Consider that even the humble Xbox 360 had plenty of better looking games than this and only had a <1 GP/s pixel peak fill rate.

I don't think this is a particularly good argument in Meta's favour.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...

There are plenty of games and apps on Quest 2 that look far better and run with good performance though... Horizons is weird because it's an ugly outlier relative to other Quest 2 titles. It feels like some kinda misstep imo.

Like which ones? I think Horizon is on par at least but definitely a step above the competition. Rec Room pales in comparison.

It's not the case of fast/cheap/good choice. Good (high quality rendering) one requires external computing unit (like PC) so not handy device. For computing abilities, Quest2 was near the best (except Apple SoC) as a standalone HMD at that time despite it was extremely cheap.

Good art direction doesn't really have anything to do with the technology. You can make something look good by making the right choices. Game developers were able to make games look good with far fewer polygons a long time ago.

I think they are making bad choices.

So for example, yes its hard to animate feet walking around on the ground, but it was a weird choice to just cut everybody off at the waist. You could have given everybody hover shoes, or a chair, or a Segway or really a lot of things.

Also, if you can't afford lighting, you can at least paint some shadowing on and around the character faces. There _are_ textures on the characters, Zuck has weird rosy cheeks, I think whoever is creating these characters is just doing a bad job of it.

But I would be very surprised if you couldn't at least have 1 key light in the scene.

>At least in terms of the cartoonish graphics, it seems to me like a case of "fast, cheap, good, pick two".

This is a good point. You would think Facebook would choose "fast, good" not "fast, cheap"

I mean you can literally run HL: Alyx on the quest 2 so this doesnt really hold up?

No, you can use a quest 2 to play HL: Alyx on your PC via Oculus Link or Air Link. In that case, all the rendering is happening on your PC, and the quest is just a display. The Quest 2 can't run HL: Alyx itself.

It does not run on the Quest 2; people stream it from gaming PCs.

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