Thoughts on Oculus Quest 2 (from a PCVR Die-Hard)

Quest 2, hope you like white

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I want to hate Oculus’s latest headset, Quest 2. See, I’m part of the contingent of VR early adopters. We’re a stoic bunch, who have eagerly braved the waters of expensive, buggy, content-sparse, difficult to setup VR headsets while the rest of the world scratched their heads. Why? Because for us, these early years of VR have given us transformational experiences that have left flatscreen games feeling dull and uninviting, like leaving The Avengers in IMAX for a black & white movie—with subtitles.

I’ve written previously about my downright distaste for the approach taken by the original Quest.

Unfortunately, most of the world has disagreed, either because they’ve neglected to try VR, or are simply frustrated by its inherent clunkiness and price. I’ve spent the last few years arguing passionately in favor of that initial vision for VR, complete with a bulky headset, cables, and an expensive attached gaming PC. Quest 2 is almost the polar opposite of that approach. Comparatively light, inexpensive, and lacking the hyper-precision of external tracking or the raw power of an external PC, it’s the antithesis of the Valve Index headset I’ve put on a pedestal. I’ve written previously about my downright distaste for the approach taken by the original Quest.

So naturally, I want to hate Quest 2. Unfortunately, Oculus has made that very difficult indeed.

A Note on Taste in VR:

If you’ve never owned a headset before, you may think of HMDs just like any other gear; There’s a set of specs that each one has, and one device will have the best specs in every category. The reality is, VR devices are incredibly complex computer/camera/display hybrids that are pushing multiple technical limits of those categories all at once. As such, every headset that exists today has a set of tradeoffs. What you quickly learn when reading (and writing) about this stuff is that experiential taste varies dramatically. Some people NEED to have the widest field of view possible, but are indifferent to how sharp that view is. Others can’t stand glare, but are happy to feel like they’re wearing a small scuba mask.

To give you a clear understanding of my perspective, here’s my ranked list of VR features, from most to least important FOR ME:

MOST
-Resolution/Optical Clarity
-Tracking Quality
-Comfort
-Sound Quality
-Field of View
-Black Levels/Contrast
-Refresh Rate
-Adjustable IPD (The spacing between the left and right eye displays)
-Wireless
-Glare
LEAST

On to the review!

There’s a lot of formal Quest 2 reviews out there, so in the interests of originality, I’ll dispense with the list of specs, and focus on the experience of this HMD, both on its own, and how it compares to my personal HMD favorite, the Valve Index, when linked to a PC. For VR nerds who might already have a SteamVR headset, I’ll also share my thoughts on buying this as a second device for playing Oculus exclusives, as well as it’s upgrade potential for original Rift owners.

First though, here’s my thoughts on each element of the headset:

THE DISPLAY

Quest 2’s “Displays” are technically one panel split optically into two

Resolution:

The raw quality of the screens are a bit hard to gauge. Nowhere in my first month with this headset has the screen ever bothered me. Text is sharp, colors are vivid, and black levels are totally acceptable, but not remarkable. Coming from the Index, I was surprised to find I didn’t notice a huge difference between the screens, despite the Quest 2 having a mathematically significant increase in pixel density. This is largely because of other limitations of the Quest, namely that many apps don’t render at native resolution (due to processing power constraints) and the Oculus Link cable compresses the image, resulting in an appearance that’s maybe a hair softer than the Index.

Screen Door Effect:

This is by far the best aspect of this display. For the uninitiated, SDE is the result of putting a display panel inches from your eyeballs. In early HMDs, low pixel density created a visible gap between pixels, which left you feeling like you had a fine mesh strapped over your vision. With Quest 2, I feel like we’ve crossed the threshold where SDE is so hard to spot that I never noticed it during gameplay. The SDE is subtly but noticeably superior to Index, and it’s the only thing I miss when switching back to that device.

Refresh Rate:

The original Quest shipped with a 72hz refresh display, far lower than the 90hz that shipped with the original batch of HMDs. In practice, lowering the refresh rate can make you sick to your stomach, and subtly reduces the sense of visual permanence in your surroundings. Quest 2 can run at 72hz, 80hz or 90hz, but not every app supports the top refresh rate, and running at 90hz native res over the oculus link cable somewhat increases the level of compression applied to the image.

Overall, I’m thrilled that Oculus bumped up the hz

I’ve got something of an iron stomach for VR, but when I tried some Oculus Link titles at 72hz, I started feeling dizzy. Bumping up to 80hz over link eliminated that feeling, and I haven’t had issues with nausea in any titles running natively on the headset, in part because most titles that haven’t increased their refresh rate have comfort features built in to limit nausea (VR game design can have a huge impact on whether or not you feel sick). Overall, I’m thrilled that Oculus bumped up the hz, and I’m happy to report that this shouldn’t be an issue in most titles for most people.

The Optics:

Down the Rabbit Hole…

The best complement to the Quest 2 optics is that I really haven’t noticed them at all. With Index, Valve really went out of its way to push forward optical HMD design, increasing the “sweet spot” that’s sharp to encompass most of the image. While Quest 2 might not be exactly as sharp, I found I could easily switch from one headset to the other without noticing a dramatic difference.

Glare:

To be frank, most Quest games don’t tend to have a lot of high contrast bright content against a dark background (the situation where glare is most evident). Thinking back, I can’t say I’ve ever noticed significant glare, but it’s never been something I’m personally sensitive to, so YMMV.

Inter-Pupillary Distance:

Being able to set the correct IPD (I.e. the spacing between the left and right lenses) is critical for getting a sharp, natural looking image in an HMD. Oculus’s latest (and final) PC-only HMD, Rift S, eschewed any mechanical IPD adjustment. The original Rift had a wide range. Quest 2 splits the difference, opting for narrow, standard and wide settings options (58mm, 63mm, and 68mm respectively).

I think Oculus has found the right compromise here between design complexity and user experience

Being of geek nobility, I measured my IPD with calipers, and got 62.5mm, so it’s not surprising that the standard setting worked flawlessly for me. I think Oculus has found the right compromise here between design complexity and user experience, but if you’ve got a particularly narrow or wide IPD, you might have a slightly blurrier image relative to other, infinitely adjustable headsets like the Index, OG Rift, or Vive.

THE AUDIO

Quest’s “Speakers”

Speaker Quality:

Coming from Valve’s excellent off-ear speaker design on the Index (and replicated in the HP Reverb G2), I’ve been spoiled with clear, loud sound, with a wide immersive soundstage. Likely for cost savings, Oculus has swapped to piped-in sound from a narrow speaker opening built into the headband of the HMD. I won’t pull punches; switching between the Index and the Quest 2 feels like going from a high-end audiophile headphone to the earbuds that come with your iPhone.

It’s tinny but serviceable sound that works fine for playing arcade-style games.

Its sound stage is surprisingly wide, giving you the impression that sound is coming from all around you, but it’s utterly let down by low volume and lack of clarity. I’ve resorted to playing most games with max volume as a result. It’s tinny but serviceable sound that works fine for playing arcade-style games. Where it really falls flat is playing more immersive games over Quest Link. A round of Star Wars Squadrons in Quest 2 was mostly fantastic, save for the crappy audio, that simply lacked the immediacy of other HMD audio setups.

The saving grace here is that the device has a headphone jack, so you can easily throw on a pair of headphones for the games where you want greater immersion. Oculus has even partnered with Logitech to offer a custom short-cabled headphone for exactly that purpose.

Personally, I found with early HMDs that over-ear headphones plus a headset is just too much weight resting on my noggin, but in-ear headphones are a good compromise, and those willing to consult the modding scene will certainly find third-party headbands with better built-in sound solutions.

Microphone:

I’ve got no criticisms here. Partying up with a fellow Quest 2 owner, I found his voice came through loud and clear. It’s a great mic that somehow doesn’t pickup any echo from the off-ear speakers.

COMFORT

The Oft-Maligned Quest 2 Head-Strap

Much has been made of the Quest 2 headband being a cheap letdown compared to the first gen version. Personally, I found it difficult to find the perfect fit, but fairly comfortable once I dialed it in (you want most of the weight resting on the curve where the back of your head meets your scalp, with a modest pressure front-to-back). I recently got a Covid haircut from the intrepid Mrs. ByteGremlin, and I haven’t had a chance to tweak the fit on my Valve Index. As a result, it actually felt more comfortable to play on the Quest that was perfectly adjusted.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could live without the headband upgrade

Oculus also sells two accessory headband upgrades (both use the same strap, but one includes a secondary battery on the back of the strap for increasing battery life). I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could live without the headband upgrade, but if you’re planning on doing two or three hour jaunts in Elite Dangerous or the like, you might find yourself wanting the Oculus Elite Strap. If I opt to upgrade down the road, I’d lean toward the more expensive battery+strap, as the extra battery weight would prove to be a good counter-balance to the HMD itself. I’d personally try your luck with the default strap before buying a replacement.

TRACKING

Quest 2’s Tracking Cameras

The only VR tracking systems I’ve ever owned were a three-camera setup with the original Oculus Rift, and the HTC Vive light-house system, which I’ve repurposed to use with my Index. Both are extremely precise, but not without the occasional glitch.

To put it simply, Oculus Quest’s inside-out tracking is shockingly good. It does have some very specific downsides, but they’re far less limiting than I ever though possible. The head tracking is perfect, as long as you avoid blasting it with a ton of direct sunlight (playing directly in front of a window in the late afternoon, I got some mild skipping, which vanished once I pulled the shade).

The main limitation of the tracking is that there are no cameras to track behind your head. Oculus compensates by using an accelerometer and gyroscope (like the sensors in your smartphone) to estimate the position and angle of your controllers.

There’s no game you can’t play with this system.

The hardest possible test for this system is a bow & arrow game like Elven Assassin, where you’re constantly pulling back an arrow directly behind your head. If you’re a VR archery ace, you will notice the lack of precision in this use case, but I found I could adjust my technique to compensate without being bothered by it at all.

The Lone Echo franchise offers another harsh test of this tracking (both LE and its multiplayer offshoot, Echo Arena, have you floating through levels where you often grab and push off of objects outside your field of view). I frankly could barely tell a difference in the tracking here relative to Index. Overall, if you have hesitations about Oculus-designed inside-out tracking, you can safely abandon them now. There’s no game you can’t play with this system.

Guardian Experience:

Another major highlight of Quest is the reliably and ease of setup with its Guardian system. For the uninitiated, all VR headsets have an option to setup a visible perimeter which lets you know when you’re leaving the physical safe area you’ve setup for VR (say when you’re about to run into a wall).

Every time you don the headset, Quest will quickly check your surroundings to see if it remembers an existing Guardian perimeter. If it doesn’t, it’ll prompt you to create one. You simply touch a controller to the ground to set floor level, than via the camera passthrough, just draw where you want your perimeter to be. Quest even highlights possible hazards within your Guardian area via small red highlight lines.

I have noticed that Quest sometimes fails to retrieve my existing Guardian; I’m not sure if that’s due to my play-space changing (i.e. new large objects being moved around) or perhaps lighting conditions, but it’s honestly so fast to setup a new Guardian that this was at best a minor annoyance.

CONTROLLERS

A Byte-Gremlin Two Thumbs Up

Having owned the first Rift a couple of years back, I was happy to come back to a very similar design. These controllers have been subtly reshaped from the original Rift, but I still found they fit my modestly sized hands quite comfortably. Build quality was solid.

Their combo of basic finger tracking (the buttons are capacitive and sense if you’re touching them), good thumb-sticks and an intuitive button layout make them a great VR workhorse, and I’ve yet to find fault with them. The battery life is also excellent, despite working off of AAs. As I mentioned in the tracking section, the performance is extremely solid in most cases.

Headset Battery Life

Clocking battery to the minute seems pretty irrelevant, as how much juice you use will vary depending on how much processing power you utilize moment to moment. I’ve consistently found that I can get over two hours in un-tethered VR.

Standby battery life is good enough for a few days, but after a week of leaving the headset unused, I found the battery mostly drained, so I’d consider keeping it on the charger when you’re not using it. For those planning three-plus hour jaunts in PCVR titles, make sure you get a USB C cable that charges the headset as well as providing a data connection.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Quest 2: Is this a “Real” PCVR Headset?

The marketing pitch for Quest 2 is very compelling: a one size fits all HMD that lets you play casual games without a PC, with the option of playing hardcore PC titles over a cable. But when Oculus announced that Quest 2 was REPLACING their PCVR lineup, it left us VR aficionados wondering if PCVR was getting thrown under the bus.

Here’s my take: Quest 2 plus link is a step down from the best of native PCVR, but a small one. It’s hard to fully describe, but the compression applied to the image makes everything look just a hair less refined than natively rendered games, almost like someone went into a PC game menu and dropped down from a “high” graphics preset to a “medium.”

I can happily live with the subtle image degradation that comes from Link’s current compression

The good news here is that Link is still a relatively new technology from Oculus, and after several years of VR, they’ve got a fantastic track record for releasing software updates that improve their products well after release. I can happily live with the subtle image degradation that comes from Link’s current compression, but I’m almost certain that Oculus will continue to improve the quality over time.

From a pure image quality standpoint, I’d say Quest 2 plus link is a solid upgrade from the original Rift or Quest, but a slight downgrade from how I’d expect Rift S to perform.

Another factor in using Quest 2 for PCVR is that the compression/decompression of the image adds steps to the graphical rendering pipeline for games. Compared to native PCVR headsets, you may see as much as a 20% drop in frame-rate. Quest 2 also has more pixels than Index, Rift S and the like, so if you’re upgrading, make sure you’ve got a GPU that can handle it. Oculus’s debug tools and settings give you lots of control over how much you want to tax your system (you can lower the refresh rate, sub/supersampling, or both, depending on if you’ve got a monster of a card, or a small rodent jogging on a wheel). I’d personally consider an Nvidia RTX 2060 or equivalent GPU as a minimum requirement for PCVR with Link.

One quick note on Link image quality: Due to the insanity of Covid and the ineptitude of Nvidia’s rollout, I’m still rocking a 1080Ti in my main system. One of the changes Nvidia made in newer graphics cards was a native compression engine that improves image compression performance. I’ve read a bunch of reports that Link works “better” on the 2000 and 3000 series cards. Performance will clearly be less of a hit for new cards, but I’ve also seen a few reports implying that the actual quality of the compression itself is also better. It’s something to keep in mind.

Convenience:

Worth mentioning is that Link remains a bit cumbersome in it’s present iteration, although I’m confident these minor issues are short-lived. Currently, every time you plug-in the headset, you’re prompted to hit “allow” so it can communicate with your PC.

I also found that every so often, Link would fail to initialize, and I’d have to go into settings and select “Oculus Link” manually for it to connect up. Once the connection was made, I didn’t have any further issues, but it is an annoying foible at present. Oculus has actually previewed its plans to fully integrate PCVR titles into the native Quest interface, so of the issues with Link, this is perhaps the most likely to be fixed in short order.

Link Cables, and an Alternative:

A word of warning: there’s a reason the official cable is expensive.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about link is that the charging cable that comes with the Quest isn’t an option for using link. Instead, you can either buy the pricey official Oculus Link cable, or one of the many third party usb c cables. A word of warning: there’s a reason the official cable is expensive. It’s got a fiber optic core for low-latency high-bandwidth data transmission, and a copper line for simultaneous charging.

It’s also got a 90 degree angled connector and a convenient velcro strap, which lets the cable run across the strap and down your back, instead of hanging off the side of your head like some sort of inefficient torture device. Most third party cables either don’t provide charging or offer reduced bandwidth (AKA more compression), and to my knowledge none offer ergonomic routing, so as silly as it seems, I have to recommend the official cable option.

The somewhat finicky backup plan is to side load the Virtual Desktop software onto the Quest, and stream your PC over WiFi to the headset. Due to limitations with my own home network layout, this wasn’t an option for me, but there are many people on reddit who will swear to superior image quality over VD, and of course you have the benefit of not having to contend with (or buy) a cable. YMMV, but if you really hate having a cable hanging off of you, definitely check this out.

SO, SHOULD YOU BUY ONE?

Quest 2 is a hell of a package. Whether it’s a good choice for you depends on your situation.

For new VR users: Quest 2 was built to be the ultimate gateway drug to VR. It’s as affordable as VR is likely to get, it’s versatile, and it’s better than it has any right to be at this price. If you haven’t gotten to experience VR, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Compared to Valve Index:

For high-budget users waffling between the Quest 2 and the Index, I still believe the Index is worth its extremely high asking price for dedicated users. It’s closer than it should be, but if you’re after the best possible PCVR headset, Index is still the best game in town. For people who are ONLY planning on playing simulation games, The HP Reverb G2 is well worth checking out, but it’s got its own share of downsides (namely that the Windows Mixed Reality platform is an afterthought, and its controllers are mediocre in tracking and design).

For Users Seeking Oculus Support and Untethered VR:

There’s a third category of user, which is the existing PCVR gamers who are considering a second headset. Much like buying a PS5 & Xbox Series X (if you can find either one), there’s advantages to having headsets from different ecosystems, and never more so than with Quest. Despite its social-centric corporate owner, Oculus has put a shocking amount of money and effort into developing exclusive content for VR. Some of my favorite games are Oculus exclusives, either for Quest, or for Oculus PCVR platforms.

I much prefer the official support for Oculus games on Quest 2.

Now, there is a free solution for accessing that exclusive content on third party platforms: Revive. Does it work? Mostly, but like most unofficial hacks, it’s an imperfect solution at best. Remapping non-Oculus controllers to work in Oculus games left me regularly frustrated, and there’s plenty of titles that either crash, glitch out, and even a few that fail to run. For all of those reasons, I much prefer the official support for Oculus games on Quest 2.

To my surprise, I’ve also found myself playing a ton of games stand-alone. It takes about five minutes to power up my PC, turn on my Valve tracking stations, and launch a game.

With Quest 2, it takes under 30 seconds, and that convenience factor really adds up, particularly for more casual titles like Space Pirate Trainer, The Climb and Robo Recall, which are a wonderful way to fill an hour a few times a week. In addition, having the flexibility to move to a larger play area has been fantastic. My PC is trapped in a small room with just enough space for VR. But I can bring my Quest to the open area of our master bedroom and really move around without constantly running into the guardian barrier. It all adds up to a rewarding gaming experience that’s distinct from the PCVR that I’m used to.

If any of that sounds like it applies to you, pick up your Quest 2 here.

 Oculus Quest 2 64GB

What about Storage options? 64GB or 256GB?

For most people, I can’t see a good reason to splurge on the256GB model. Literally all you’re upgrading is the storage, and most Quest games are heavily optimized and very small (think a couple of GB). If you’ve got slow internet, an ISP data cap, or are just all in on installing a lot of standalone games, the 256 version is probably worth it, but for most people, stick with 64GB.