Oculus Quest 2's experimental 120Hz patch planned for March
Very experimental, but also very exciting for Quest 2 owners.
A 120Hz refresh rate to rival the Valve Index out of the box is coming to the Oculus Quest 2, albeit in an experimental 'see how it goes' capacity. Following hints to the upcoming feature from Facebook AR and VR VP, Andrew Bosworth, a few weeks back, the Oculus Quest developer roadmap now confirms the feature is tentatively in development for March.
The Quest platform roadmap is available to those with a developer account for the VR headset. First spotted by UploadVR, we're also able to verify that it is indeed a proposed feature on the roadmap, and comes with a proposed release window, surprisingly, this month.
The experimental feature would bring the Oculus Quest 2 to refresh rate parity with the Valve Index out of the box. That last bit is important, though, as the Index will actually push 144Hz with its own experimental mode. Still, it's not too bad for the headset that launched with support for 72Hz alone, only later receiving a firmware update to enable 90Hz.
"This release offers experimental support for 120Hz refresh rates only for apps that support it," the roadmap says. "The feature will happen in two parts: API support for devs, Experimental Settings toggle to enable 120Hz and user being able to toggle 120Hz for supported apps."
Being only of "medium" confidence that it will stick to the proposed time frame for release, the 120Hz Refresh Support feature is tagged with a large "EXPERIMENTAL", which says to us that, not only are delays somewhat likely, support is anything but guaranteed.
But there must be potential, at least. Otherwise we wouldn't see word one of 120Hz support, nor would Facebook's VPs be happy teasing such a feature.
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That is to say I'm hopeful of such a feature, even if eventual application and game support is limited for a while. As the roadmap says, expect developer API support ahead of any official user release.
Increasing refresh rate will be that much more demanding on the Quest 2's Snapdragon chip, however, 120Hz even more so than 90Hz. So perhaps we'll see more of a use for such a feature with Oculus Link enabled between PC and headset, as opposed to natively through the headset's internal chip.
That's not all that's cooking up in the Oculus camp, however. Rumour has it that an Oculus Quest Pro could be in the works. That was something that Bosworth once again alluded to, and that seems to be a good marker of what's going on behind the scenes at Facebook's VR subsidiary.
Perhaps that rumoured headset will be even more a match for the Valve Index. Though it must be said the Quest 2's biggest advantage over Valve's high quality headset has to be its $299 price tag. Any Pro headset would need to be considerate of costs, too.