FaceBook OverSharing Leads To An Oculus Quest 2 Leak

Facebook Account Required In This Virtual Monopoly

Ah Oculus, once a groundbreaking Kickstarter to bring VR to the masses but quickly becoming something completely different after Zuckerberg came calling with a fat pocketbook.  Since then it has only become worse, with owners of the original system being given a limited time to join Facebook or lose access to their software and hardware.  It should come as no surprise that any new Oculus hardware doesn’t even offer a grace period and if you want to play you have to sign up.

Even so, the recent leak revealing a bit about the Oculus Quest 2 is worth looking at, after all there are a few people who are on Facebook already and have no compunctions about sharing their virtual lives in addition to their real ones.  The Quest 2 will be a standalone VR system just as the original was, and will give us a look at the performance capabilities of the new Snapdragon XR-2 and the Adreno 650 GPU.  Qualcomm announced their VR chips earlier this year, stating it would have twice the CPU and GPU power of the previous 835, and of course it offers both 5G connectivity and AI processing.

The resolution will double from the previous odd resolution of 1600 x 1440 to 3200 x 2880, or as some call it, almost 4k resolution or almost 2K per eye.  There was no mention of a refresh rate in the leak, though one has to assume it will at least match the 72Hz of the original and possibly even be increased a bit.  That should remain within Qualcomm’s stated specs of the Adreno 650, with three times the texel processing rate and 1.5 times the pixel processing rate of the 835, for a total pixel throughput 2.5 times higher than the 835.

The Quest 2 is described as smaller and lighter than the original Quest, though we don’t have any actual numbers yet and there will be new ergonomic controllers.  This may mean that older controllers will not work with the new model, though the leak did not offer a definitive answer to that.  The other missing detail is the price, though as Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN points out, if the current 128GB original costs $499 the new 256GB Quest 2 is likely to cost a fair bit more.