The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

Keep your finger on the pulse of the XR industry with the Daily Roundup, the most important news in one daily email.

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

In its announcement of Red Matter 2 earlier this year, developer Vertical Robot made the ambitious claim that it would deliver the “best graphics on mobile VR to date.” And now a new video shows the studio backing up its claim with some evidence.

While the Quest 2 library certainly has some great looking games, most have targeted a low-poly art style to match the headset’s limited processing power. Games aiming for a ‘realistic’ art style have a much harder time delivering the little details like lighting, reflections, shadows, and particles that add a sense of realism.

With the release on Red Matter 2 next month, targeting that challenging realistic art style, developer Vertical Robot aims to deliver the “best graphics on mobile VR to date,” and it looks like they might just pull it off. A new video released this week shows some of the visual details the studio has optimized to look great and still run well with Quest 2’s limited power budget.

As far as Quest 2 games go, we have to admit this is looking very impressive.

Most of the features shown in the video are taken for granted on console and PC games, especially in non-VR games which use a method of rendering that makes such visual details easier to run. But on Quest 2—which is powered by little more than a smartphone processor—it’s rare to see things like ray-traced reflections, volumetric lights, reflective transparency, and the like.

Red Matter 2 is set to launch on August 18th on Quest 2. It’s also coming to PC VR on the same day, and we’re curious to see how much further the graphics can be pushed with that extra PC power.

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Love the glass bottle shader work going on here. Nice little nod to Valve. It would be kind of funny if liquid containers became the Wilhelm Scream of VR.

I really enjoyed the first game.

Anyone can pre-render the hell out of the graphics to get more realism, but the trade off is going to be less free roaming.

That Macintosh font is a big hint where all those textures were generated…

I think he means is pre baked lighting. The limited texture memory for lightmaps will limit scene size. Can do very small good-looking scenes but not large open world levels.

so.. just like alyx? it’s a corridor shooter too, with very few open spaces, and even then they are open, but playable part is confined to small areas.

Anyone can pre-render the hell out of the graphics to get more realism, but the trade off is going to be less free roaming.

Yes, go back and play Alyx, you’ll see they use a mix of real-time dynamic lighting/shadows and baked lighting/shadows. And it’s pretty much agreed that Alyx is a ‘Hallway Shooter’. That said, Alyx still looks great, is fun to play; thus I’m looking forward to Red Matter 2

If you think this will ship on Quest 2, I have ocean front property in Dakota to sell you real cheap.

Very cool! I can imagine how they did a few of them, but for the others… wow

Awesome to hear its coming for PCVR too! Nowhere near as many compromises there :D

It’s really impressive-looking. Haven’t played the first one yet as I haven’t decided whether to play through on PCVR or Quest, and this makes that decision harder