SAN JOSE—In a wide-ranging and occasionally rambling unscripted talk at the Oculus Connect conference today, CTO John Carmack suggested the Oculus Quest headset was “in the neighborhood of power of an Xbox 360 or PS3.”
That doesn’t mean the Quest, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, can generate VR scenes comparable to those seen in Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though. As Carmack pointed out, most games of that generation targeted a 1280×720 resolution at 30 frames per second. On Quest, the display target involves two 1280×1280 images per frame at 72fps. That’s 8.5 times as many pixels per second, with additional high-end anti-aliasing effects needed for VR as well.
“It is not possible to take a game that was done at a high-quality level [on the Xbox 360 or PS3] and expect it to look good in VR,” Carmack said.