John Carmack claims that the Oculus Quest is as powerful as PS3/Xbox 360 generation consoles

At the Oculus Connect conference, CTO John Camack spoke in-depth about the company’s $399 Quest VR headset, including its relative performance when compared to consoles. 

With the Quest, Oculus hopes to “end up competing with the Nintendo Switch” within the portable gaming market, with Carmack comparing the device’s performance to last-generation consoles, stating that the headset is “in the neighbourhood of power of an Xbox 360 or PS3.”

Right now the Oculus Quest is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, offering two 1600×1440 displays on the headset itself. Most last-generation console games targeted a resolution of around 720p with 30 FPS framerates, which means that the Oculus Quest has to divide its power over a pixel count that is significantly larger, though this is somewhat countered the larger amount of memory capacity/bandwidth that is available on the device.  

On the Oculus Quest, the device’s targets resolutions of 1280×1280 on each screen at a frame rate of 72FPS while gaming, an increase of over eight times when compared to typical framerate/resolution targets for PS3 and Xbox 360 in terms of pixels per second. On top of this Oculus wants to utilise high-end anti-aliasing techniques to clean up these images. 

This goes a long way towards explaining why the Oculus Quest’s games have been seen as unimpressive thus far, though it is worth noting that the Quest headset can impress in other areas. For starters, the headset offers a six-degrees of freedom without any external tracking, offering what Oculus calls “Arena Scale” motion tracking, moving beyond the capabilities of all other portable VR headsets. The Oculus Quest is said to consume around 5W of power under load.