[nrp]

“ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.”

Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latency related work was withered technology too. We used MEMS sensors that were being made in enormous quantities for mobile phones, and a lot of the latency philosophy came from old concepts of “chasing the beam” in rendering.

[Fr0styMatt88]

For me, the use of the Snapdragon 835 in the Oculus Quest seems like a really good example of this philosophy as well. Definitely 'withered' by the time the Oculus Quest was released. Yet it's doing things to a quality that I've never seen it do in any Snapdragon 835-based phone.

[gambiting]

Same can be said about the Switch - the Nvidia Tegra chipset used is absolutely ancient by modern standards, yet in the Switch it's used to much higher quality than in any other device with the same or similar chipset.

[nrp]

A lot of that has to do with being able to run at high sustained clock frequencies by designing in an adequate thermal solution. Phones just don’t have the space to allow for that, so games have to be designed around throttled performance.

[Impossible]

This is a combination of costs and timeline. Oculus Quest development started in 2016 or 2015. Snap dragon 835 released in 2018 and Quest shipped in 2019. Now, Quest shipped 6 months after 865 so it would have been possible for Facebook to co-develop Quest with Qualcomm and potentially ship with an 865, but due to various factors (VR is a small market, Facebook doesn't have a close relationship with Qualcomm like console manufactures have with AMD, Quest needed to be "cheap")

[CookieMon]

While it's beside your [good] point - you can do VR with fifty cent lenses and early headsets did, but the lenses in headsets like Oculus are specialised and still evolving.

[ascagnel_]

Oculus also spent a ton of money to source and develop the best 50-cent lenses they could -- it's easier to spread the cost of R&D over many headsets than it is to spread the cost of expensive specialty parts.