Meta Quest 3’s standalone graphics—with the same polycount models, materials setup, and target frame rate—look remarkably like its PCVR counterpart. Achieving this parity in Marble Mechanics required overcoming several platform-specific hurdles. Below, each challenge is paired with the solution we implemented.

Challenge 1: Renderer Contrast & Saturation Mismatch

Issue: Vulkan mobile renderer on Quest 3 produces deeper shadows and punchier colors than the Rift’s DX12 renderer, making the standalone build appear extremely over-contrasted.

Solution:

- Toned down certain texture saturation and/or brightness

- Applied a low contrast and cool colored HDRI skylight to soften highlights.

- Balanced directional light intensity versus ambient to flatten extreme contrasts.

Challenge 2: No Post-Processing Volume on Quest 3

Issue: Quest 3’s vulkan mobile render doesn’t support Unreal’s Post-Process Volume

Solution:

- Increased local light counts: strategically placed extra point lights to simulate soft bounce lighting present on Rift.

- Manually tweaked each light’s falloff exponent and color temperature for depth cues.

Challenge 3: Simulating Global Illumination

Issue: Quest 3"s Vulkan mobile render lacks soft bounce lighting present on Rift.

Solution:

- Added fill-lights in shadowed areas to mimic indirect bounce, and in highlight areas to mimic bloom.

- Turned up Skylight intensity to lighten deep shadowed areas.

Challenge 4: Texture Compression Artifacts

Issue: Large tiled textures with high-frequency normal maps compressed poorly on mobile (ASTC/DXT), resulting in visible blockiness and lost detail.

Solution:

- Identified problematic textures and created alternative tileable maps with reduced high-frequency detail.

- Adjusted normal map intensity.

- Tested compressed textures in the packaged APK, iterating until visual fidelity matched the Rift build.

Results & Takeaways

- Both Quest 3 and Rift maintain a rock-solid 72 FPS under these settings.

- Visually, lighting, color balance, and material fidelity now read nearly identical across platforms.

- Key lesson: with careful light placement and color tweaks, mobile shading can approach PCVR quality—even without built-in post-process effects.

Thanks for reading! If you’ve tackled similar cross-platform rendering challenges or have questions about optimizing for Quest, feel free to drop a comment or join the conversation on Discord.

Marble Mechanics is coming soon to Meta store