Meta finally got a 2014 PC game demo to run on the Oculus Quest 2

techradar.com:

Meta wants to prove that its Meta Quest 2 VR headset (formerly Oculus Quest 2) isn’t the underpowered hardware game developers might believe it to be. And it’s doing so with a 2014 PC game demo.

For Oculus Connect 2014, Epic Games built Showdown, a PC VR demo using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). It was designed to show off the awesome levels of detail a VR setup could provide.

The experience shows a high-octane scenario slowed down to bullet-time to emphasize the action as a team of soldiers fight off a rampaging robot. Fiery smoke trails behind the missiles the robot is launching, and rubble and cars are flung off in a variety of directions due to the resulting explosions. It looks and feels like a warzone.

Some elements look a little dated today, but at the time this was the best that PC VR setups could achieve  – setups that consisted of an Oculus Rift headset hooked up to a PC with a GTX 980 GPU or similar.

Now, roughly eight years later, Meta has managed to get a severely trimmed down version of the Showdown demo to run on its Quest 2 hardware at a smooth 90 FPS  – the same as the original (via Road to VR).  

Meta wasn’t just doing this for a fun throwback though. Its optimization efforts have been cataloged in Oculus For Developers blog posts so that other creators can mimic what it has done with Showdown in their own games.

While it's fun to joke around this being a nearly eight-year-old demo, getting Showdown to run on the Quest 2 is no mean feat. 

The Quest 2’s Snapdragon XR2 chip isn’t as powerful as the hardware Showdown was designed for, and the details about how this was pulled off are long enough to fill not one, but two long blog posts jam-packed with technical jargon. 

As seen in the video captured by Road to VR above,