Meta Quest 3 unlocks better graphics for VR ports of classic FPS games
Team Beef has ported games like Half-Life and Doom 3 to standalone headsets. Meta Quest 3 enhances their graphics right out of the box.
The three-person development team has brought first-person shooters such as Doom 1-3, Quake 1-3, Half-Life, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Star Wars Jedi Knight II to Meta Quest 2. Currently, Team Beef is working on the VR port of Quake 4, among other projects.
The VR versions of these games, which can be found on Sidequest, have been downloaded millions of times, according to Team Beef.
Prior to the release of Meta Quest 3, one of the three developers, Grant 'BaggyG' Bagwell, told me that they were looking forward "to increased performance across the board" that could take the VR ports to a new level.
The excitement was justified: Bagwell now tells me that the VR ports are running at the higher Quest 3 native resolution (30% more pixels) and at a higher refresh rate, leading to things "being much clearer and smoother". In preliminary testing, the team also found that performance is improved even at this higher resolution.
Updates will roll out after more testing
The performance gains come as no surprise: the Snapdragon XR 2 Gen 2's GPU offers up to 2.6 times higher performance than Meta Quest 2's GPU, allowing Meta to increase the VR headset's default resolution by a whopping 30% compared to Quest 2. All VR games benefit from this improvement without developers having to make any changes.
Bagwell also tells me that all of the team's existing VR ports work with Quest 3, so no updates are necessary.
Dr Beef is glad to report that all ports he tested so far worked flawless on #MetaQuest3 with ~30% increased resolution for stunning clarity out of the box! ?@DrBeef @grantjbagwell #VR pic.twitter.com/zxCyERRkoy
- Team Beef VR ports - JK:Academy, Quake4 in EA NOW! (@neitey) October 10, 2023
However, testing with Quest 3 is still in the early stages. "Once the whole team has Quest 3 units, we'll be testing extensively and providing updates with the best Quest 3 default settings automatically applied," Bagwell writes.
Additional enhancements may follow
In the meantime, some VR ports like Doom3Quest allow users to adjust the frame rate and supersampling settings themselves.
Whether or not completely new graphical features like dynamic lighting and stencil shadows from Doom 3 will be enabled in the future is something the team will have to test on a game-by-game basis.
If you want to support Team Beef, you can do so on Patreon. There you can find more information about all the VR ports the team has made so far. You will need the original games, Sidequest, and a PC to install and play the full versions of the VR ports on Meta Quest 3.
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