Use the following comparisons to help you choose the version of Unreal Engine that best matches your development needs for building a Meta Horizon OS app. There are several methods of obtaining versions of Unreal Engine tooling, but they do not have feature parity, and the differences between them are not immediately obvious.

For app development with Unreal Engine 5, you can:

Download Unreal Engine 5.0 and later from Epic and then install the Meta XR Plugin

Download the public Unreal Engine build from Epic Games Launcher and then install the Meta XR Plugin into it from the Meta XR plugin downloads page. You’ll miss out on VR-related bug fixes and performance optimizations that Epic Games has yet to add to their public Unreal Engine build. This option is only available if you install the most recent Meta-supported version of Unreal Engine 5 from Epic.

Download Unreal Engine 5.0 and later source code from the Oculus-VR fork of GitHub and compile Meta’s version of Unreal Engine 5

Download the Unreal Engine source code version of your choice from the Oculus-VR fork on GitHub and then compile a bespoke version of Unreal Engine 5 that contains the Meta XR plugin and all of Meta’s VR optimizations and bug fixes up to the version you install. This also lets you further modify Unreal Engine 5 with your own custom code.

For app development with Unreal Engine 4, you can:

Download the Unreal Engine 4 source code from the Oculus-VR fork of GitHub and compile Meta’s version of Unreal Engine 4

Download the Unreal Engine 4 source code from the Oculus-VR fork on GitHub, and then compile a bespoke version of Unreal Engine 4 that contains all of the Oculus VR plugin, as well as all of Meta’s VR optimizations and bug fixes up to the version you install. This also lets you further modify Unreal Engine 4 with your own custom code.

Note: This is the only way to install a version of Unreal Engine 4 with the plugin.

Compare the features and fixes between these Meta XR development options to determine which best suits your needs and style.

Features

Feature	UE 4	UE 5 Oculus-VR Fork	UE 5 Epic Version + Meta XR Plugin
Hand Tracking	✓	✓	✓
Movement SDK	✓	✓	✓
MR Occlusions (Depth API)	-	✓	Limited
Passthrough	Limited	✓	✓
Scene SDK	Limited	✓	✓
Spatial Anchors	✓	✓	✓

Performance

Feature	UE 4	UE 5 Oculus-VR Fork	UE 5 Epic Version + Meta XR Plugin
Application Space Warp	✓	✓	-
Dynamic Resolution	✓	✓	✓
Eye Tracked Foveated Rendering	✓	✓	-
Fixed Foveated Rendering	✓	✓	✓
Iteration Time Improvements	✓	✓	-
Late Latching	✓	✓(v63+)	-
Layer Supersampling and Sharpening	Limited	✓	-
Mobile compositor layer depth testing	-	✓	-
OS Splash Screen	✓	✓	✓
Additional Perfetto Markers	✓	✓	-
Software Occlusion Culling	✓	✓(v77+)	-
Tonemap Subpass	✓	✓	✓
VR MobileHDR	-	✓(v62+)	✓
Mobile Deferred	-	✓	✓
Enhanced LightGrid Based Dynamic Local Lights	-	✓(v72+)	-
Uniform Based Dynamic Local Lights	-	✓(v65+)	-
Emulated Uniform Buffer	-	✓(v65,v67+)	-
Adreno Occlusion Path	-	✓(v65+)	-
Meta Quest Super Resolution (MQSR)	-	✓	✓(v68+)

Fixes

The Oculus-VR GitHub fork contains the latest features and bug fixes that are not yet available in the standard Epic source distribution, including:

PSO Cache

Fastbuild

Multiple Vulkan renderer updates

Note: To access the Oculus-VR fork of the source code, you need a verified Meta Developer Account, as well as Epic Games and GitHub accounts that are linked. For more information, see Prerequisites for installing Unreal Engine.

Samples

Samples can be found in the public Oculus-Samples GitHub repository:

https://github.com/oculus-samples

GitHub tag naming convention

Note: The GitHub tag naming convention also includes the OVRPlugin and SDK version.

This GitHub tags link contains a list of the Source Code Distributions Meta released. The tags are formatted as “oculus-(UnrealEngineVersion)-(OVRPluginVersion)-(OculusSdkVersion)”, for example “oculus-5.1.1-release-1.82.0-v50.4”.

https://github.com/Oculus-VR/UnrealEngine/tags

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