The graphics on the Quest 2 have always looked... soft... or a little blurry to me.
Don't get me wrong, I think the Quest 2 is an amazing piece of hardware.
I wouldn't have made so much content about it if I didn't. At it's price point there's
nothing else out there right now that even comes close to it's capabilities
but that hasn't stopped me from wanting games on it to look a little sharper.
Something a little more like
This!
Yup, this is running natively on the Quest 2, it looks really good doesn't it?
I've been reading a lot of stuff online and have watched a lot of videos with people giving tips
on how to improve the graphics on the Quest 2 and recently I found a way that wasn't just
adjusting the IPD or adjusting the headset on your face or making sure your lenses are clean.
You can actually increase the resolution games are rendered at;
making them look noticeably sharper and clearer.
There are of course some hoops to jump through and some tools were going to need to do this
but it's actually all fairly simple.
The first thing you're going to need to do is go to dashboard.oculus.com on your PC
and register your Oculus Account as a developer.
I've placed the link to this page in the video description and it'll take you right there.
If you aren't already logged into your Oculus or Facebook account on your computer you'll need
to do that and then You'll click in this field here and type in the name of your Organization.
You are free to name your Organization whatever you want
and then you'll want to check the little I understand box here and then click Submit.
If you're using a Windows PC you'll then need to download
and install the Oculus ADB drivers to your PC.
If you're on Mac or Linux you don't need to worry about this step.
I've placed the link to the drivers on Oculus' developer site
in the video description which looks like this and you'll want to click on the big blue
download button, check I have read and agree to the terms of license box and then click download.
Once you have downloaded the driver you'll want to unzip the file... open this folder...
then open this USB driver folder and right click on this android_winusb inf file and click Install.
Once you have the driver installed you'll want to
restart your PC and then grab your smartphone or tablet for the next step.
We now need to enable developer mode on our Quest 2. To do this you'll first want
to make sure your Quest 2 is turned on and connected to the same wifi network
as your phone and that your phone's bluetooth connection is turned on.
Now we can open the Oculus app on our phone.
Tap on Menu here down at the bottom.
Then on Devices...
and if we scroll down a little bit we'll
see Developer Mode here in the settings. Tap on that and then toggle this little switch on.
The next step is to install an application called SideQuest to our PC. SideQuest is similar to the
Oculus app in that it's a place where you can browse and purchase different games for the
Quest 2 many of which are not available on the official Oculus store. Since it isn't officially
supported by Oculus any apps you get on SideQuest will have to be side loaded onto your Quest 2
and accessed through this drop down in your apps menu and found under Unknown Sources.
But that's not what this video is a tutorial for
so anyway
SideQuest also offers some additional tools which is what we're going to be
using to increase the resolution of our games.
Just like with everything else I've placed a
link to SideQuest's download page in the video description for your convenience.
Depending on what operating system
you have on your PC you'll select the version of SideQuest you want accordingly. Most of you
are probably running Windows PC's so we'll click on that and the download will begin.
Once you've downloaded SideQuest you'll want to launch the installation file and follow the
on screen prompts to install it. You'll then want to launch SideQuest on your PC
and connect your Quest 2 to your PC using a USB cable. You'll then need to put
on our headset and you should see this message to Allow USB Debugging. If you don't want to
have to click Allow on this every time you connect your headset then you'll want to click
Always Allow from this Computer. And then you'll see this message asking if you want to allow your
PC to access data on your Quest 2 and I typically click Allow on this. You don't have to click allow
but I always do because then I can browse the files on my Quest 2 using Windows Explorer.
Now when we look at SideQuest we should have a green circle in the upper left hand
corner of the window like this letting us know our headset is connected and
it should say Oculus Quest 2, it's network ip address and the current battery level.
Now we're finally ready to do what we came here to do.
At the top of the SideQuest window you'll want to click on this
wrench icon and in this menu we have a bunch of different settings we can try out and play
with. For this tutorial though there's only one we're the most interested in and that
is this one here toward the bottom of the list called Default Texture Size.
Basically this setting can
increase or decrease the resolution games on the Quest 2 are rendered at.
You're welcome to try out any or all of the different settings but the one I found that
increases the graphics quality without really effecting the frame rate is 2048.
2560 of course looks even better and for the most part the games I tested with ran
fairly well at 2560 but I did notice the frame rate wasn't quite as smooth;
and if you try to cast to your phone or TV at this resolution the performance really begins to tank.
That being said if you want to see just how sharp and clear the display on the Quest 2 can be
I totally recommend cranking it up to 3072 just to see how good things look but be aware
you will see a huge impact to the frame rate. Every game I tried was unplayable,
in my opinion, at this resolution but MAN did they look amazing!
The one big caveat to this is the settings are only temporary.
As far as I know there is no way to permanently implement these settings. As long as you don't
reboot your Quest 2 or power it all the way down though the settings will remain in place.
But as soon as you reboot, everything will be set back to normal.
On the bright side if you change settings and end up with some really wonky stuff going on
all you have to do is reboot or power down your Quest 2
and power it back up again and everything should be all good.
You can play around with some of the other stuff like the Fixed Foviated Rendering which the higher
you set it puts less strain on the CPU and GPU because it allows them to render the stuff around
the edges at a lower resolution while leaving the stuff you're concentrated on in the center at full
resolution. I tried this out at various different levels and when I was playing a game I didn't
really notice much of a difference to the visuals at all when I set this on the highest setting.
Changing the CPU and GPU Level may also help some with performance,
level 4 is maximum performance by the way, but I imagine most games are
already running things at this level to get the best performance possible because
I honestly didn't notice any difference in the games I tested it with between
leaving it at whatever the game normally has it set at and manually setting it to Level 4.
So yah, that's it. Thanks for watching... and uh... have fun!