Oculus Quest ‘Significantly Faster’ Than Oculus Go, 6DoF Tracking ‘Doesn’t Affect’ Performance
Quest is significantly faster than Oculus Go from both a CPU and GPU perspective. Part of this is just the raw performance of the chipset itself, but a lot of it has to do with the effort we’ve put into the design of the headset and the core rendering architecture. Tracking isn’t in contention with and doesn’t affect the performance of your application.
Oculus Quest is essentially a VR games console. Like Go it is standalone with all the compute onboard, but unlike Go it has room scale tracking and Touch controllers.
Whereas Go features a Snapdragon 821 chipset, Quest uses the newer and faster Snapdragon 835. It’s around 30% more powerful, or can achieve the same performance with around 40% less energy.
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Thermal throttling is arguably the core flaw of smartphone VR. It can limit graphically intense experiences to a matter of minutes. To overcome this, Go used a heatpipe and the entire front is metal, allowing it to act as a heatsink.
This cooling system allowed Facebook to overclock the Snapdragon 821, and to sustain that performance for hours. The result was that Oculus Go performs “significantly better” than a Galaxy S7 using the same chip.
Quest goes even further with cooling by adding an active cooling fan.
tracking is not done on the CPU, but rather on the Hexagon DSP- digital signal processor.