Hands-on with Oculus Link: Rift Who? – TechCrunch



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Four months after its release, the Rift S seems irrelevant.

My colleague Josh and I went from the front with a first demo of Oculus Link, a feature launched in beta in November, allows Quest users to connect their headsets to a PC and play games that require a little more power than Quest's built-in compute.

The difference between playing an upcoming title like Stormland in Quest's $ 399 stand-alone game with Oculus Link and playing it on the $ 399 Oculus Rift S PC is incredibly tiny and is clearly not a sell-out enough for anyone , except the snobbest VR snobs, should bother to buy a Rift. S.

The screen resolution gives the impression that it is currently better than what was possible on the original Rift, but less than the full resolution of the Quest. The Quest reads the contents at 72 frames per second, compared to 80 frames in the Rift S. You'll also have one less onboard camera for upside-down tracking. A Facebook engineer on the booth said that the latency on Oculus Link would be higher than that on the headsets designed for personal computers, but that it should nevertheless be comfortable for most users, it would not enter the figures.

To use this function, you will need a USB-C 3 cable. The charging cable that came with your Quest will not be. Oculus will publish its own cable after the end of the beta, which you can buy separately.

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In the end, playing is the real test, things were not as fluid as on a headset at 90 frames per second (or more), but it's not something the Rift S can handle, then you always get a very pleasant experience. very solid. You use your Quest – even if it's attached – and you get a PC experience. The textures were richer and the environments more complex, but you use the same headset, even if you need a PC that conforms to the specifications recommended by Oculus.

In the end, I'm not quite sure what this cool technology does for Oculus.

It cannibalize Rift S sales 100%, but I can not imagine that too many Quest users will buy gaming PCs to use Link. Nevertheless, it is a very cool platform that allows the Quest to sell better than users who are deeply rooted in virtual reality and have already acquired the first generations. All I know for sure, is that I would be very pissed off if I bought a Rift S instead of a Quest.

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