John Carmack is not only a legend inside of the virtual community, but any tech industry. The man is a legendary coder and designer, and one who always is speaking his mind. In his most recent Twitter response, the Oculus CTO said that the Rift S is still worth buying even though your Oculus Quest will be able to run PC VR games and Rift games through the Oculus Link.
In case you missed it, Facebook unveiled a technology they have been working on since before their two latest headsets were released. At the Facebook Oculus Connect event, Oculus Link was announced, and it is going to change the way people use virtual reality forever. It gives users the ability to hook their Oculus Quest (Oculus’ standalone headset) up to their gaming computer to play higher-quality games. This is done through a simple connection through a USB-C cable from the headset to your PC. It is going to launch in November sometime, and Oculus users are more than excited to use it.
Although it may seem like this is a complete replacement of the Oculus Rift S, it isn’t. In fact, its not much of an upgrade at all. If you have a Rift S and Quest, there is no real reason for you to ever plug your Quest into your PC. Both headsets have inside-out tracking, but the Rift S has one more camera than the Quest. The Rift S also features stronger haptics in the controllers, higher resolution, fastest refresh rate, and even lower latency while running games.
The Rift S released only four months ago, and some owners feel like they are missing out on the Quest by its capability to go wireless as well as become a PC headset. The Rift S replaced the original Rift that was big back in 2016, but now just a little brother to one of the greatest headsets in the world. The Quest launched at the same time as a wireless version to the Rift S, with nearly the same inside-out tracking. The Quest feels like a wireless experience in every sense of the word. All of the good and bad that come with going wireless come with the Quest.
Carmack is known for telling the truth about the technologies inside of the company, good or back. You can check out his original response below.
Referring to the Oculus Quest latency and Beat Saber, he says that it “doesn’t make any sense to play Beat Saber over the link — play it locally without the cable!” This is an obvious statement as the latency on the Quest is bad enough, especially once you get to the higher difficulties.
The haptics aren’t are as strong, the quality of image is lower, the speakers aren’t as good, and the tracking is off a bit often on the Quest. The Oculus Link isn’t going to be able to fix all of that, but it is going to fix some of the problems that we saw before. The picture is going to be improved and latency should be a topic of discussion once it is more official.
Oculus is only adding their riches of customers as the Oculus Link is sure to bring more customers to their platform and to Steam. We aren’t sure how well the Oculus Link will work for massive AAA VR games, but we are sure it will give it more ability than ever before. For more VR news and updates, make sure to check back at VRGear.com.
