Meta Developers

When developing for the Meta Quest, optimization is critical in creating polished apps that meet customer expectations in terms of quality and Meta Horizon Store requirements. This section contains guides on using some of the performance optimization tools available when developing for the Meta Quest.

The Meta Quest’s mobile chipset presents challenges that differ from those present in PC VR development. For example, apps running on Meta Quest must use fewer draw calls, less complex shaders, and format art assets to compensate. A graphics debugger, like RenderDoc for Oculus, can help locate such optimization opportunities. A profiling tool that lets you look in detail at the GPU pipeline during rendering, such as ovrgpuprofiler, can show when there are render stage timing issues that can affect frame rate and keep your app from peak performance.

In short, performance issues often arise because of the difficulty of maintaining a stable 72 Hz frame rate on the Meta Quest’s mobile chipset. By using these tools to systematically track down the issues that are causing performance problems and then implementing the necessary optimizations, you can create a significantly better user experience.

Links for Device and Environment Setup

You must have your device and development environment configured for Meta Quest development. If your development environment and device have already been prepared for Meta Quest development, no further preparation is required.

If you need to prepare a test environment, instructions for device and Android SDK setup will differ depending on how you are developing your app:

Unreal Engine

Topic	Description
Quest Developer Hub	Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) is a companion development tool that surfaces a collection of frequently used solutions, such as capturing screenshots and recording video, casting the headset display to a computer, and active notifications for updates. It offers an engaging developer experience and accelerates the overall iteration process through simple mechanisms such as connecting the headset wirelessly to the computer and disabling the proximity sensor and boundary.
Use ADB with Meta Quest Mobile Devices	Android Debug Bridge (ADB) is installed with the Android SDK and is a prerequisite to using the other tools in this guide. It is used to establish a connection between a computer and an Android device, as well as other common file tasks.
Collect VrApi Logs with Logcat	Logcat is a command-line Android SDK tool that collects system logs. Logcat can be used to retrieve Meta Quest `VrApi` logs that provide data on app performance and device settings every second. The VrApi Stats Definition Guide defines the statistics in VrApi logs.
Monitor Performance with OVR Metrics Tool	OVR Metrics Tool is a tool for analyzing mobile apps that provides a real-time graph overlay of app and device data as well as exportable reports. The OVR Metrics Tool Stats Definition Guide defines the data available in OVR Metrics Tool.
Configure Android System Properties	Android system properties are system-level configuration options that can be useful for debugging and testing potential changes on a running device.
Get Started with Unreal Insights	Unreal Insights is a profiling and analysis tool that allows you to quickly find bottlenecks, performance spikes, threading patterns, and more. This guide walks you through the setup process of using the tool.
GPU Profiling with ovrgpuprofiler	`ovrgpuprofiler` is a low-level CLI tool present on Meta Quest that provides access to real-time GPU pipeline metrics and render stage tracing.
Use Perfetto for Render Stage Tracing	Perfetto is an engine-agnostic performance tracing tool with some major advantages over built-in engine profilers, such as the inclusion of a wide view of system processes and additional metrics on the same timeline as the app’s performance profile. It maps functions calling into OVRPlugin to the OS directly and gets insight into various GPU counters and metrics at a high level to better isolate performance issues. It can also generate GPU render stage traces.
Use RenderDoc for Oculus for GPU Profiling	RenderDoc for Oculus is a fork of RenderDoc for use with Meta Quest. In addition to RenderDoc’s normal graphics debugging capabilities, this version provides access to low-level GPU profiling data from the Meta Quest.
Using Oculus Debugger for VS Code	Describes how to use Oculus Debugger, which a Visual Studio Code extension that is primarily intended for real-time debugging of Unreal Engine apps for Meta Quest. It fully supports debugging Meta Quest applications (APK files) and Native C/C++ binaries.

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