Quest Games Optimizer, the paid software that lets Quest users boost game performance, has now topped over 100,000 users.

Initially released in 2022, Quest Games Optimizer is a tool Quest users can run in the background during gameplay that can increase resolution, performance, frame rate, and increase battery life across all Quest headsets—from the 2019 original all the way up to Quest 3S.

Now, its creator ‘Anagan79’ announced Quest Games Optimizer has reached over 100,000 users. Provided all were paid full-price users, this would amount to over $1 million in gross revenue from the $10 app, which notably includes a lifetime license.

Granted, the optimizer doesn’t work with all Quest games, however the team has included a reference list of supported titles, amounting to 1,000 Quest apps which have been tested and approved to work with Quest Games Optimizer.

The app dopes this by letting you adjust various hardware system settings for each game installed on your headset, allowing you to use preset or create custom profiles to tweak things like render resolution, refresh rate, CPU and GPU levels, and fixed foveated rendering.

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Unlike the bulk of Quest apps, which are offered either on the official Horizon Store or through SideQuest, the sideloading platform and storefront, Quest Games Optimizer is offered exclusively through its website and distributed via itch.io.

Still, one of the easiest ways to sideload the app is via SideQuest’s Advanced Installer, which allows you to install apk files via a tethered PC connection.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Stephen Bard

    We have heard only good things about this optimizer, so why isn't it just a Settings choice in the headset unless Meta thinks it overstresses the hardware unacceptably ?

    • flynnstigator

      It’s just one in a series of bizarre omissions in Meta’s strategy. They’ll throw billions of dollars into XR, but they won’t do something as simple as hire a few people to do an optimization job that a single passionate guy in France was able to accomplish, a job that elevates their headset to almost-PCVR levels of fidelity and would have been worth many times the cost in grassroots marketing.

      Speaking of PCVR, they don’t really support it anymore, but they refuse to kill it, so it’s a frustrating mess of middleman software and bad wi-fi and USB implementations, and they won’t allow someone like Virtual Desktop’s Guy Godin to fix it for them for free. Streaming is in a similar boat, with inexplicable hit-or-miss Chromecast support, terrible latency, and bad compression artifacts. Good streaming = more sales, bad streaming = observers don’t buy a headset and it’s no fun at parties.

      These kinds of head-scratchers show that Meta simply doesn’t have what it takes to remain #1. They can temporarily occupy that position by writing big checks, but long-lasting leadership as the industry matures will take more than just deep pockets. You either hang onto leadership with vision and talent, or you come up with a way to force people into your ecosystem like Microsoft. Meta has none of the above.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        TL;DR: this is more complicated than Meta not picking the low hanging optimization fruits out of negligence, as the Optimizer overwrites settings made by game developers, something Meta has to be very careful about.

        but they won’t do something as simple as hire a few people to do an optimization job that a single passionate guy in France was able to accomplish

        That's not a fair assessment. The "Quest Game Optimizer" sets Android/Horizon OS properties for games to different values than the developers of these games picked. In some cases this may be due to lack of optimization from the developer's side, or older titles that were never updated since release, completely ignoring newer hardware.

        Simple property changes usually won't elevate the game to PCVR levels, most of it is about increasing render resolution, forcing FFR or increasing texture size for added details, and you sort of have to balance it for each game and headset to not accidentally cause the framerate to drop. You also have to decide whether to prioritize performance, image quality or battery life.

        So for one there is not one optimal setting that Meta could just switch to. Meta allows developers to pick CPU/GPU performance levels from 1-4. There are many reasons to not simply always set them to 4, like different game levels with varying amounts of geometry requiring different GPU performance levels, or scenes with lots of physical objects needing more power to be given the CPU than the GPU without the heat generated by both causing them to throttle. For example enabling ETFR on Quest Pro means you no longer can run apps above CPU level 3 due to the extra compute needed. Increasing the hand tracking frequency also reduces available performance, more so on older headsets, and many settings will impact battery life.

        One of the jobs of game developers is to pick the best balance for their game, ideally with different adjustments for different HMDs, or allowing the user to choose between for example more FPS or longer battery life. It would be somewhat controversial if Meta simply went and overrode these settings, causing the game experience to be different from the developers intended, even if it would mostly be better. Allowing the users to set these properties themselves from within the Quest UI would be an option, but of course a lot more complex than just picking from one of several existing profiles. And you can already do all this via adb.

        The "Quest Game Optimizer" provides a valuable tool for users that is based on options Meta already provides through the standard Android debugging tools, but puts a nice user friendly interface on top that hides the technical details. This allows users to tweak games that either have not been properly adapted by their developers, or have been balanced with a different set of priorities, all without Meta changing the game settings without the developer's admission. And there is no simple way how Meta could tell if a suboptimal setting is due to an oversight or actually intended that way by the developers. They would basically have to ask them. And they already provide a lot of tools and documentation about properly optimizing Quest apps. Unfortunately developers often ignore these do to involved effort, lacking skills, or already having abandoned/stopped updating an app due to lack of financial success.

        • flynnstigator

          I agree that Meta shouldn’t unilaterally change settings, but hiring staff to playtest different settings and then reaching out to top devs to improve the marketability of their games (and the platform along with it), and track the sales value of those improvements with data is not rocket science, it’s basic marketing. I know I’m often very harsh with my criticisms of Meta, but I just can’t respect any company with such vast resources that leaves such a basic marketing strategy on the table.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Oh, I'm not going to argue that there aren't lots of things that Meta could and should do to improve esp. the communication with developers and options for users to adjust things themselves. They are running MRL/Quest very much like a black box, telling nobody what is going on, not even fundamental numbers/trends required for others to decide on whether to invest into the ecosystem or not. They occasionally just change the rules, block things until their own version is ready, kill projects and business models and have everybody trying to figure things out by themselves. To say that there is room for improvement would be a big understatement. I just understand that sometimes there are valid reasons behind what they do, even if those aren't obvious because they never bother to explain them.

            I won't argue even less that it somehow makes sense how any company with such vast resources can mess up very basics things so badly and then apparently not learn from it. I also cannot fathom what the hell they are spending all that money on, and I will probably never understand, again because they won't ever tell us to where it all vaporizes.

    • Vryan

      My guess is they want to keep battery lasting around 2 hours and don't want any complaints about performance

  • xyzs

    That sounds like it should be part of the OS.

    Also, this OS could be a lot more optimized, John Carmack said, if they were using less high level language abstractions all over the place.

  • Octogod

    Congrats to Anagan79!

  • giuseppederiuscanu

    All I know is that it's the first app I launch when using my Quest 3. It gives that super resolution wow effect to most environment. I wonder why Meta doesn't include this settings in the system themselves!!!! It's a massively improved visual experience.

    • brandon9271

      Probably have to big of an effect on battery life

      • flynnstigator

        I’ve never noticed any negative effect on battery life in any of the games I’ve played with it. QGO also has a battery saver profile in most games.

        The difference in image quality is staggering in a lot of games, especially if they haven’t been updated for the Q3. Moss 2 went from a pixelated mess to almost-indistinguishable from the PCVR version for me, and if there was any difference in battery life, I couldn’t tell. Like the poster above said, it’s the first app I launch when I turn on the HMD, and I won’t play without it.

        • kraeuterbutter

          same for me…
          i bet:
          some games (most games in the store) will look better with Game Optimizer than they will look without on the coming Quest 4 ;-)

  • XDeathShotX

    So people need to pay $10 on you of $500+ to get the most put of their quest games relying on a user instead of the Meta team.

    What a shame.

    Of course there's having to pay more to be comfy with this on yo head.

    HMD manufactures need to do more with their offerings,

    • Ondrej

      You expect a computer. But they don't want to sell you a computer. They want to sell you a locked gadget with their software tax.
      Huge difference.

  • Andrew Jakobs

    Shame it isn't also available for the Pico 4, I'll bet it will also benefit from an app like this.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Not really a replacement, but most of the optimizations are simply setting some system/debug properties to other values, overriding whatever the game developers picked. You can do that yourself via adb from a PC, after enabling USB debugging in the developer options. Example:
      adb shell "setprop debug.oculus.textureWidth 2048 && setprop debug.oculus.textureHeight 2048"

      It should work pretty much exactly the same way on the Pico 4, only some of the property names will be different. Available properties can be listed with
      adb shell getprop

      This is of course way more hassle than having everything in a single USD 10 app that can also remember settings for individual games and already has thousands of profiles. It may still be interesting if you have a few games that would really benefit from for example increasing the render resolution, and once everything it is set up, very quick. You can basically create your own profiles and simply cut and paste them into the shell.

      It should also be possible to set up a wireless ADB connection directly from an Android phone to either a Quest or a Pico 4 and sending the commands from there, removing the need for the PC, but setting this up will take it even further from the convenience of an app you can simply sideload.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Yep, it is the hassle of having to do it through your PC or separate android phone which makes it why I'd rather have such an app. Also with such an app you don't have to scouer the internet for finding all these tidbits and settings.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          You could sideload a "flat app" Android ADB shell that lets you send the commands directly from within the Pico 4, eliminating the need for a PC or separate phone. But I'm not even sure if the Pico OS configuration would allow for this to actually work, and you'll probably won't find at least somewhat decent instructions on how to configure this, even with a lot of scouring the internet for tidbits and settings.

          All the Quest Game Optimizer settings just use regular Android debugging options that were already used to tune Quest games before the app was released. The sole reason it was released was that there was enough demand from lots of Quest owners to make the development financially feasible and ultimately very profitable. It's very unfortunate that the US government decided to go after TikTok/ByteDance and by this way stopped Pico's expansion plans dead in their track, which could have massively increased the number of sold Pico headsets, making it much more likely for similar tools to be released there too.

  • JanO

    Just like gaming on a PC, QGO gives users a bit more freedom as to how they want to run their apps (resolution, frame rate, cpu & gpu levels and foveated rendering level). And just like on PC, inexperienced users can shoot themselves in the foot with bad settings…

    While it does provide a battery saver option for some games, this isn't why we're here… The main attraction is the ability to dial in better graphics than the stock option and this will always come at the cost of increased heat an battery usage.

    That being said, if you have the time and knowledge to fine tune your app of choice using QGO along with the Oculus metrics tool, results range from good to absolutely stellar!!!

    For some apps, I'd go as far as saying this was game changing!

    This is the best 10 bucks I've spent on Quest, since it made all previous purchases better..!

  • Till Eulenspiegel

    Same thing with Nintendo Switch, you can hack the device and overclocked it to get a much better performance – but why didn't Nintendo do it themselves? They have a safety standard, increasing the wattage will overheat and reduced the life of the battery in the long run.

    By pushing a device to run faster than it's designed, risked damaging it or worse – battery explodes due to overheating. If the battery explodes in a VR headset, your face will be burned.

  • Till Eulenspiegel

    Same thing with Nintendo Switch, you can hack the device and overclocked it to get a much better performance – but why didn't Nintendo do it themselves? They have a safety standard, increasing the wattage will overheat and reduced the life of the battery in the long run.

    By pushing a device to run faster than it's designed, risked damaging it or worse – battery explodes due to overheating. If the battery explodes in a VR headset, your face will be burned. That's probably why Meta didn't allowed it to be sold in their shop, they don't want to pay for your facial surgery.

  • Vryan

    Meta isn't going to put an app on its so that overrides settings. Side quest has decided they don't trust it. There are at least two other apps that offer similar features for free in sidequest. Sidequest itself and the occular migrane. I personally just use sidequest and bump up to max on older games. Never had an issue and I don't feel i need it on newer games

  • Ondrej

    Same reason Apple wouldn't allow it in any of their stores.

    These corps are control freaks and they think they own the device even if you paid for it.

  • HindsiteGenius

    The developer is riding on the backs of the piracy apps. He cooperates with Rookies and Armegeddon who encourage its use on pirated games while getting protection from the two main pirate apps as well as keeping this off the torrents. This is why he’s been successful.

  • Compliments to its creator!