Best on Quest 3: Devs Making the Most of Our Most Powerful Headset Yet

With double the graphic processing power of Meta Quest 2,* it’s no surprise that Meta Quest 3 is our most powerful headset yet. It’s also the world’s first device to feature the new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 platform we helped develop in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies. And our 4K+ Infinite Display** nets you a nearly 30% leap in resolution compared to Quest 2—with 25 pixels per degree and 1,218 pixels per inch for the best resolution across the entire Meta Quest line. But what exactly can you do with all that increased processing power, next-gen pancake lens optical stack, and 25% boost in sharpness compared to Quest 2?

Plenty, it turns out, as several developers in our Best on Quest 3 program have found. Check out the official launch lineup for a rundown of titles that’ve been remastered to make the most of Quest 3’s peak performance, and read on to hear from a few devs in their own words describing all that the new tech stack brings to the table.

And because seeing = believing, let’s kick things off with a showcase of the new-and-improved Red Matter 2!

With a background spanning both AAA console game development and the mobile space, Vertical Robot Co-Founder Norman Schaar had his first foray into VR during the DK2 days. Following some freelance work in the industry, he truly cut his teeth on The Invisible Hours for Rift.

“I just jumped right in,” Schaar recalls. “And then six or nine months later, I got together with a couple of friends and we started Vertical Robot. Since then, we’ve been working on Gear VR, Go, Rift—everything.”

While the original Red Matter was developed during the PC VR era, Red Matter 2 had Quest to contend with—so optimization was the name of the game.

“When we started Red Matter, there was no Quest,” says Schaar, “so everything was designed for PC only. There was very little care put into optimization just because PCs were so powerful. With the sequel, because we knew we had to support Quest all the way up to a PC, we designed the content and the architecture and how everything is actually constructed to be scalable. With a slider, hopefully you’d be able to easily slide between low processing power and high processing power, and there wouldn’t be any requirement to put in extra work. With the original Red Matter, it took us like 10 months to just turn that slider down because we basically had to re-engineer everything for Quest. That thankfully wasn’t the case with Red Matter 2 where we had built it with a mobile chipset in mind.”

Of course, that’s not to say that the sequel is in any way less than its predecessor—quite the contrary. While prioritizing performance, the dev team managed to squeeze in far more content and many more objects on screen than the original.

“It wasn’t really holding us back in that sense,” Schaar explains. “Of course, Quest 2 can only do so much—and Quest 3 is pretty crazy. The performance that we now have access to is such that I was even surprising myself. We were bringing over all these high-quality textures from PC and console over to Quest 3, and in some instances, it wasn’t enough. Because of the pancake lenses and just the resolution, we were spotting textures where it was not evident on PC that they were lower than they maybe should have been. So even the textures from PC, we had to go back again on Quest 3 and increase them even further in certain instances.”

Thanks to the pancake lenses, Vertical Robot saw an unprecedented level of clarity and texture resolution, not to mention the resolution of the render. In preparation for Quest 3’s launch, the team optimized its texture compression methods so that they would be more efficient. Combined with the increased memory available on Quest 3, and they were able to increase texture sizes up to roughly 16 times more pixels per texture. The addition of dynamic shadows further helps close the gap between PC and standalone VR, as does an increase in texture filtering.

“There’s no going back,” Schaar says. “It’s truly amazing how sharp the visuals are and the clarity, and it’s just great. Honestly, it’s shocking. If you think back, it’s only been a few years since the first Quest came out. It is truly crazy how much we have progressed. This is Red Matter 2 as it’s meant to be seen.”

“We were really impressed with both the CPU and the GPU boost that Quest 3 offers compared to Quest 2,” says Digital Lode Founder & Creative Director Michael Wentworth-Bell. “The major thing we’re adding to Espire2 is atmosphere. It’s a stealth game, so it’s pretty important that the lighting is right—and the general atmosphere is what helps with immersion. What we really wanted to add was the effect of volumetric lighting on standalone hardware, where you could see light shafts coming through and you could see diminished lighting into the distance, so you can see enemies coming out of the shadows. I feel like, on Quest 2 we got a hint of that, but Quest 3 actually allowed us to add atmospheric particles and the effect of volumetric lighting.”

As an Unreal Engine shop, Digital Lode used Unreal’s Niagara VFX System to make that additional atmosphere a reality.

“For the first time with Quest 3, we were able to actually have hundreds of these atmospheric particles all through the level,” Wentworth-Bell notes, “and they can take dynamic lighting from the environment around them. Each atmospheric particle animates and reacts with the environment. The end result in the headset looks tremendous. We’re super biased, obviously, but we really think it’s a night and day difference to the game. Our opening sequence of the game is in the military facility in the snow, and it feels like you’re actually in a snowstorm outside now. We had the sound effects previously of all the wind blowing. Now, you’ve literally got snow in your face and the wind blowing everywhere, so people playtesting have actually felt cold.”

The improvements don’t end there. The dev team also added vastly improved material rendering, including physically-based rendering (PBR) for roughness and metallic surfaces. They also increased texture resolution across the game by at least four times and in many cases eight or 16 times.

“​​It’s worth highlighting that some of these visual improvements are for Quest 2 as well and Quest Pro,” adds Wentworth-Bell, “and that’s due to Meta having increased the CPU and GPU of Quest 2 in 2023. That actually gave us that overhead. It was a really great opportunity for us to do a pass of the whole game’s campaign. It’s got a single-player campaign that’s about six hours long, a two-hour co-op campaign, and then there’s a shorter arcade-style, Espire ops challenge mode. We did visual uplift across all of that content, and that’s our major boost to the game.”

In the name of increased realism and detail, Digital Lode also added cockroaches to the game’s sewers, birds taking flight outside, and other elements to add life to the game. And the game’s signature Espire Vision feature (essentially x-ray vision) has also gotten an upgrade.

“Now, it looks like it’s making these point clouds everywhere—like a LiDAR scanning system just like the Quest 3 depth sensor putting all of these points all over the environment,” Wentworth-Bell says. “In VR, it looks awesome because you’ve got your stereoscopic left- and right-eye vision and you’re navigating through the world using all the dots—all the data points. It really feels like this is what a robot would see. It truly actually feels like you’re seeing the world through Espire’s eyes.”

The update also includes 24 mixed reality missions, which the devs pitch as ”the world’s first stealth action game that’s in your house.”

“We’ve spent 2023 coming up with a design methodology where there’s a series of 16 missions designed for smaller spaces and eight designed for larger spaces, and it’s an experience that offers variety,” says Wentworth-Bell. “One second, you might be trying to solve puzzles where you’ve got to look around your environment and find important intel to unlock doors. The next minute, you’ve got to shoot a helicopter that’s breaking through your window into your room. Before Quest 3, this kind of experience wasn’t possible.”

Last but certainly not least, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, which we showcased at Meta Connect. While it’s not ready for primetime just yet, the optimized version will feature more vibrant colors, increased foliage and set dressing, more detailed and higher resolution textures, dynamic shadows, dynamic lighting for the flashlight, and more.

“The bottom line is that we used the technology to improve the game in as many places as we could,” says Skydance Interactive Senior Vice President of Marketing & Publishing Guy Costantini. “The game is just more vibrant—it’s more immersive. Where it’s most visible is in the lighting—the dynamic shadows, which really lend an extra layer of realism to the game. You’re going to definitely see more walkers on camera where it matters. It is quite stunning when you see the number of walkers that we’re able to render on screen simultaneously.”

While the original may seem a little foggy and washed out on our last-gen hardware, many of the hardware constraints present with Quest 2 have been lifted with Quest 3.

“It’s the best version that you can experience on a standalone headset,” Costantini notes. “Our entire claim to fame is that we try to make AAA VR games. That’s our objective: big, deep games that have complex mechanics and truly immersive worlds—and Quest 3 allows us to do that to a level that Quest 2 was unable to. Quest 2 was a watershed moment for VR, and we think that this is a true next step. We’re excited about it because we pride ourselves on getting as much juice out of the hardware as we can.”

Those are just three of the Quest titles that have been optimized to take advantage of all that Quest 3 has to offer. Here’s just over a dozen more that are already available now or on the way:

• Blade & Sorcery: Nomad — Coming Soon
• BONELAB — Coming Soon
• Death Horizon: Reloaded — Available October 10
• Dungeons of Eternity — Available Now
• GOLF+ — Coming Soon
• Guardians Frontline — Available Now
• Into the Radius — Available Now
• MOTHERGUNSHIP: FORGE — Available October 10
• Pistol Whip — Available Now
• POPULATION: ONE — Available Now
• Resist — Available October 12
• Shadowgate VR: The Mines of Mythrok — Available October 10
• The Wizards — Coming Soon
• Zenith: The Last City — Available October 10

So what’re you waiting for? Get yourself a Meta Quest 3 and see what the future of immersive gaming has to offer.