Quest Pro is the first headset with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 1 chipset and supports foveated rendering.
Other current standalone headsets – including Quest 2, Pico 4, Vive Focus 3 and Lynx R1 – use the regular XR2, recently retroactively labeled Gen 1. It has the RAM stacked on top of the chip, while XR2+ handles the RAM. the side to allow better thermal dissipation and thus higher durable performance.
Qualcomm said XR2+ can deliver “50% more sustainable power” and said “several” other OEMs will announce devices using it by the end of the year.
Meta said Quest Pro has “50% more power than Quest 2 with better thermal dissipation, resulting in significantly better performance.” However, a representative told UploadVR that the figure “refers to the increased SoC power that supports additional sensors and new usage scenarios,” and that apps that don’t take advantage of these new features only have “a little more performance leeway.”
Recent Import Logs suggest Quest 3 may have a GPU at least twice as powerful as Quest 2. But those logs are indicative of early test chips, not mass production.
| Headphones | Snapdragon chipset | RAM | Foveated View |
| Quest 2 | XR2 Gen 1 | 6GB | I |
| LYNX R1 | XR2 Gen 1 | 8GB | I |
| Pico 4 | XR2 Gen 1 | 8GB | I |
| Pico 4 Enterprise | XR2 Gen 1 | 8GB | |
| ViveFocus 3 | XR2 Gen 1 | 8GB | $249 add-on |
| Quest Pro | XR2+ Gen 1 | 12GB |
Quest Pro also has built-in eye tracking and supports Eye Tracked Foveated Rendering – a technique where only the small part of the screen you are looking at is displayed in full resolution, freeing up the performance since the rest has a lower resolution. That extra performance can be used to improve graphics fidelity or for a higher perceived render resolution.
However, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth cautioned that given the overhead of eye-tracking, the result is actually a “relatively small optimization.” This ties in with comments made last year by “Consulting CTO” John Carmack, who warned of “unrealistic hopes of 10x improvements.”
Meta’s headsets have supported Created Foveated Rendering—which renders the edges of the lens at a lower resolution—since Oculus Go six years ago, and Carmack claimed Eye Tracked Foveated Rendering won’t get “even 2x” compared to that.
You can certainly do things with it, but a lot of people had unrealistic hopes for 10x improvements. You don’t even get 2x vs solid foveation.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) May 12, 2021
Still, given the extreme performance limitations of mobile chips, even marginal improvements should be a welcome benefit for VR developers.