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Choosing Unreal Engine installation by feature compatibility

Updated: Apr 17, 2026

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 from Epic and then install the Meta XR Plugin

This option is only available if you install the most recent Meta-supported version of Unreal Engine 5 from Epic. 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. This installation option does not include the VR-related bug fixes and performance optimizations that Epic Games has yet to incorporate into its public build.

Download and compile Unreal Engine 5 source from the Oculus-VR GitHub fork

Download the Unreal Engine source code version of your choice from the Oculus-VR fork on GitHub and then compile a custom build 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.

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

UE4 compatibility

For UE4 compatibility information, see Legacy UE4.

Notation: ✓ = fully supported, - = not available, Limited = partially supported, ✓(vXX+) = supported from OVRPlugin/SDK version XX onward, ✓(vX,vY+) = available in vX then stable from vY onward. For MR Occlusions (Depth API), the Epic version + Meta XR Plugin supports the legacy hard occlusions mode only; soft occlusions and depth texture access via the Depth API Material Graph require the Oculus-VR fork. See MR Occlusions (Depth API) get started.

Features

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

Performance

Feature	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	✓	✓
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+)

Note: Application Space Warp requires the Oculus-VR fork in stable Unreal Engine releases. Starting in UE 5.7, Epic’s native xr.OpenXRFrameSynthesis CVar provides equivalent functionality without requiring the fork.

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

For a complete list of fixes and improvements by version, see the Oculus-VR fork release tags⁠ on GitHub.

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

Samples

Samples can be found in the public Oculus-Samples GitHub repository. The samples cover features including hand tracking, passthrough, mixed reality, spatial anchors, scene understanding, and rendering techniques. Each sample README indicates whether it requires the Oculus-VR fork or is compatible with the Meta XR Plugin.

Oculus samples repository⁠

GitHub tag naming convention

The Oculus-VR fork release tags⁠ list the source code distributions Meta has released. Tags are formatted as “oculus-(UnrealEngineVersion)-(OVRPluginVersion)-(OculusSdkVersion)”, for example “oculus-5.1.1-release-1.82.0-v50.4”.

To select the right build, match the UnrealEngineVersion segment to your project’s engine version, then choose the highest available OVRPluginVersion for that engine to get the most recent Meta XR features and bug fixes.