Is the Oculus quest emulating x86 games ?

[Yoann654]

Hi, i've been looking lately at the different vr headset options and I've stumbled on a question I didn't found any answer on Google. 

 

How is the Oculus quest able to play games like beat saber, super Hot, or even the next Half life listed as compatible, while running on an Android system with an Arm processor. 

In the meantime the Oculus go is seen by everyone as the cheap, not powerful, vr headset, while it's using Android too, with a snapdragon 821, that is just slightly less powerful than the 835 of the quest.

 

So why the Go doest support any of those games and just ''small'' experiences (that looks very bad in term of graphics quality)? . 

 

Am I missing something ? Is the Quest Streaming the games or something? Thanks. 

[kelvinhall05]

No, it's not streaming the games. I bet the Go could run those games only slightly worse than the Quest, but Oculus wants you to buy the more expensive one.

[trufret]

On 12/30/2019 at 7:57 PM, Yoann654 said:

Hi, i've been looking lately at the different vr headset options and I've stumbled on a question I didn't found any answer on Google. 

 

How is the Oculus quest able to play games like beat saber, super Hot, or even the next Half life listed as compatible, while running on an Android system with an Arm processor. 

In the meantime the Oculus go is seen by everyone as the cheap, not powerful, vr headset, while it's using Android too, with a snapdragon 821, that is just slightly less powerful than the 835 of the quest.

 

So why the Go doest support any of those games and just ''small'' experiences (that looks very bad in term of graphics quality)? . 

 

Am I missing something ? Is the Quest Streaming the games or something? Thanks. 

The Quest can run games in 2 modes.

 

1) Native quest games written for or ported to run on Android/Arm by their developer.  Many popular VR titles like Beat Saber, Super Hot, Robo Recall, etc.. have been ported to run on the Arm soc but generally have reduced graphical complexity then their PC counterparts due to the lower power hardware they have to run on. 

 

2) PCVR games streamed to the Quest with the PC doing all the heavy lifting and quest taking in a video stream and sending back movement data.  This can be done over wireless via 3rd party apps or more recently natively using a Quest Link cable or compatible USB3 cable. This allows you to play pretty much all of Steam or Oculus's PCVR library without having to buy another headset.

 

In this way Quest can be both a mobile VR headset and a PCVR headset depending on what game you want to play.

 

The GO lacks the 6dof room scale tracking cameras and motion controllers of the Quest and PCVR headsets and is using a less powerful ARM soc so while it may be possible to get some roomscale games running on a GO it's going to require a lot of tinkering an 3rd party apps and give a very poor experience compared to running the game on the hardware it was designed for.

 

The GO is more of a media device / personal movie theater that can play some simple VR games.