John Carmack has commented on the upcoming higher 120Hz refresh rate on Oculus Quest 2, stating that only a few existing games will offer support.
A few weeks ago in an Instagram AMA, Facebook’s Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality, Andrew Bosworth, teased the potential of a future software update for Oculus Quest 2 adding support for a 120Hz refresh rate. Given that support for 90Hz only just launched last November, we suspected that 120Hz might still be a while off. However, earlier this week an official Quest platform roadmap from Facebook suggested the feature could arrive as soon as this month.
Only a few existing games will be tweaked for 120, but some new titles will consider it an option in their design phase.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 1, 2021
A user on Twitter pinged John Carmack, Facebook consulting CTO and legendary game developer, about just how many games will be able to run at 120Hz on Quest 2 when the support starts to roll out. “Only a few existing games will be tweaked for 120,” he replied. “But some new titles will consider it an option in their design phase.”
We discussed 120Hz support and the potential of a new Oculus Quest Pro model in yesterday’s episode of The VR Download, which you can watch above.
Since adding support for 90Hz back in November, several Quest 2 games have updated with support to run at the higher refresh rate. However, the jump from 90Hz to 120Hz is a big one and many beefier titles would probably struggle to hit the latter consistently with the Quest 2’s hardware.
As Carmack points out, a few existing games with more performance overhead will likely be able to get there, but it’s more likely that titles in development will see more success by accounting for a 120Hz target in their design process from the very beginning of the development cycle.
