Boosting CPU and GPU Levels
Updated: Feb 27, 2025
Meta Quest 2, Pro, 3, and 3S headsets with Horizon OS v57 (released October 2023) or newer can now access additional CPU and GPU levels. Developers can enable these in their apps to enhance performance.
These higher levels are available as long as ambient environmental conditions allow for sufficient cooling. The update enables the following clock speed increases:
| | CPU | GPU |
|---|
Meta Quest 2 | 25% (45% in dual-core mode) | 18% |
Meta Quest 3 | 7% | 10% |
Meta Quest Pro | 25% (45% in dual-core mode) | 10% |
These changes enable apps to access as much power as possible and throttle as little as necessary to remain within the thermal limits of the device.
On Meta Quest 2 and Pro, apps can run at up to CPU level 6 and GPU level 5 (for reference, see
CPU and GPU levels).
The techniques at your disposal to let your app run at these higher CPU and GPU levels are:
See the “CPU/GPU level availability” sections of
CPU and GPU levels for maximum CPU/GPU levels. Apps with lower CPU/GPU level availability (i.e. due to Passthrough usage) can still use these techniques, but they won’t reach the same maximum CPU and GPU levels as apps that don’t use Passthrough.
On Meta Quest 3 and 3S, apps can run at up to CPU level 5 and GPU level 5 (for reference, see
CPU and GPU levels). Currently, an app can only reach one of these maximums at any given time.
The technique at your disposal to let your app run at these higher CPU and GPU levels is:
See the “CPU/GPU level availability” sections of
CPU and GPU levels for maximum CPU/GPU levels. Apps with lower CPU/GPU level availability (i.e. due to Passthrough usage) can still use these techniques, but they won’t reach the same maximum CPU and GPU levels as apps that don’t use Passthrough.
GPU level 5 is contingent on also enabling Dynamic Resolution. The reason for tying GPU level 5 to dynamic resolution is that dynamic resolution can scale the app’s “eye buffer” (default texture for rendering) up or down based on available GPU headroom. This helps applications to not drop frames if the headset needs to thermally throttle down to GPU level 4, instead preserving performance at a lower resolution. Additionally, it improves quality when GPU level 5 is available, without any specific logic required on the developer’s part.
Apps should be designed to target GPU level 4 as the highest GPU budget it has access to. Treat GPU level 5 as a quality bump that is only available as a user’s environmental conditions permit. Specifically, GPU level 5 can only be granted when the headset has sufficient thermal headroom. As a result, you should never rely on GPU level 5 for your app’s functionality, or to meet performance criteria such as minimum framerate requirements.
Dual-core mode provides even higher clock speeds at the expense of only allowing the app to use two CPU cores instead of three. The thermal budget of the core that’s not being utilized can be added to the thermal allowance of the remaining cores, allowing apps in dual-core mode to the fastest clock speeds available on the headset.
Applications should only enable dual-core mode if they are bounded by single-core performance. Generally, this means the application spends most of its per-frame time performing one long, sequential series of updates.
Perfetto is an effective CPU core visualization tool to determine if an application is constrained by single core performance. It is generally expected that power consumption is reduced if work can be distributed across cores at lower clock speeds, but if this is not an option then enabling dual-core mode is worth considering.
Requirements
Dual-core mode is only supported by Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro. Meta Quest 3 headsets don’t support dual-core mode at this time.
Apps must use the OpenXR backend. Apps built with the legacy OVRPlugin backend do not benefit from this enhancement.
To use dual-core mode, add the following metadata line to your app manifest, within your <application> element:
<meta-data
android:name="com.oculus.dualcorecpuset"
android:value="true" />
Applications that use dual-core mode see their CPU level jump from CPU level 4 using three cores to CPU level 6 using just two cores.
If using dual-core mode together with a ProcessorPerformanceLevel lower than SustainedHigh, the app may initially start at a lower CPU level, but jumps to level 6 when CPU utilization increases high enough.
Keep in mind that if you use dual-core mode, your CPU frequencies will increase, so even if your current workload does not fit into two cores at CPU level 4 or 5, it might at the higher frequencies provided in dual-core mode.
Also keep in mind that an app will always have better performance by parallelizing its CPU operations to efficiently use every available core, rather than by simply enabling dual-core mode. App developers should perform extensive profiling, and a review of their codebase, to determine whether their app will perform better with CPU level 5 or dual-core mode.
Apps developed in Unity tend to be good candidates for dual-core mode, since Unity’s
Update() loop is single-threaded and often is the bottleneck for finishing a frame. In this typical case,
Perfetto’s CPU core visualization feature shows something like the following:
Observe how the app heavily utilizes CPU core #5 (which is dominated by UnityMain), but only partially utilizes CPU cores #4 and #6. Apps with core utilization profiles like this are good candidates for dual-core mode: core #5 is bounded by single-core performance, and cores #4 and #6 both have a utilization of under 50%, so it’s likely that the work could be combined into a single core.
In high-performance scenarios in which you’re likely to come up against the thermal governor needing to downclock your processors, your app has the ability to indicate whether it prefers to preserve CPU speed or GPU speed. This setting can be useful if you know your app is limited so much by either GPU or CPU performance that lowering one level to raise the other will result in an overall improvement in your app’s performance.
Once you’ve chosen to trade a level, this choice becomes part of the app manifest and it can’t be changed while the app is running.
Requirements
Meta Quest 3 running OS v57 or later.
Apps must use the OpenXR backend. Apps built with the legacy OVRPlugin backend can’t benefit from this enhancement.
The app manifest is where the CPU and GPU trading configuration is defined.
Enabling CPU and GPU level trading: To configure trading between CPU and GPU, add the following metadata line to your app manifest:
<meta-data
android:name="com.oculus.trade_cpu_for_gpu_amount"
android:value="1" />
Where value is
- 1 = +1 level to gpu, -1 level to cpu
- 0 = no change.
- -1 = -1 level to gpu, +1 level to cpu
Troubleshooting CPU and GPU level adjustments
If you question whether an app is taking advantage of boosted CPU or GPU levels, you can identify boosted apps through our diagnostic tools.
OVRMetrics CPU and GPU level display Logcat strings for CPU and GPU level Logcat strings for dual core mode To determine if dual core mode is active, search adb logcat to find a string similar to the following printed on app startup:
CreateClient: Value of isCPUSingleThreadedBoost is 0 / 1
Logcat strings for trading CPU and GPU levels To determine what degree of CPU and GPU trading is taking place, search adb logcat to find a string similar to the following printed on app startup:
CreateClient: Value of tradeCpuForGpu is 1
