After playing some pinball on our Polycade cabinet, Trista and I revisited VR pinball on our Quest 3, and we both thought it was a meaningfully better and more fun experience in VR.

There is an interesting wrinkle: @PinballFX used an efficient custom engine for a long time, but they switched over to Unreal Engine for their current games to more easily support the wide range of platforms they deploy on. Pinball FX uses Unreal, but they left the older version available as PinballFX Classic, which makes for a nice comparison.

After downloading the 40x larger new application, you find that it has tons of customization features and environmental effects, but most tables drop frames even on Quest 3. The Classic version is locked at an unfortunately low resolution, but it feels more solid when actually playing pinball.

Quest Game Optimizer can adjust resolution and frame rate if you are willing to go through the Side Quest dance, making a fairly dramatic impact on the visuals. I just gave Meta a nudge about maybe allowing QGO into the official store, but ideally the developers would add a few lines of cold to the old application to default to different settings for the different Quest headsets. Touching an old application is a bigger ask for a developer than most users appreciate, though.

Both the old and new versions are kind of a mess with preventable visual aliasing. Here is a post I wrote ten years ago about aliasing for GearVR developers, long before Quest existed:
facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/1818885715012604

sRGB framebuffers and sRGB textures with mip maps, MSAA, go light on specular shading effects.

< Dr Manhattan it’s 1985 meme >