Comparing VR Rendering Models

For the past several months I've been working on building environments for the Oculus Quest. While deploying my environments to device, I learned a few things about what makes lighting in VR look good on device, such as the fact that SM5 shows (much) better results than Vulkan, which means tethering via USB is sometimes advised. Running on PC is always going to be better than mobile, but how much better SM5 on PC is than Vulkan in device is pretty significant.

To test the models fidelity, I created two projects with the same assets, one for SM5 and the other for Vulkan. (This is actually recommended by Epic in the forums).

I learned that in VR stationary and movable lights are very expensive and you may only get as many as 4, so I changed all my lighting to static (even though static lighting doesn't show up in UE5's Lumen).

Here is an example of the SM5 model running on a cinema camera rail:

Here is an capture of the SM5 model running on inside the Quest (excuse the lag, it's introduced by the XBox capture utility):

And here is the Vulkan model running from an APK on the Quest: