What you need to know
- Reports have been piling up of a “low memory” bug appearing on Meta Quest 2 and 3 headsets since at least May.
- Users would find that games randomly crash and a reboot would often not fix the issue.
- The problem appears to have been caused by the “seamless multitasking” option, which was an experimental feature until Quest firmware v83.
Over the past few months, a nasty memory leak on Quest 2 and 3 headsets has been giving users grief while simply trying to enjoy their VR headsets. A public test build of firmware v83 just rolled out to users this week and may finally have a solution to a problem that was keeping Quest gamers from enjoying their headsets.
In a nutshell, Quest games would randomly crash, giving users a “low memory” error that didn’t seem to make sense. Reports have been piling up on Reddit since roughly May, with users noting that the v76 firmware update seems to have caused it. Meta has released several bad updates to Quest headsets this year, but the latest v83 update may be a light at the end of the long tunnel.
Some users have surmised that this problem began with the “seamless multitasking” feature Meta introduced in the v74 update in February, which allowed Quest owners to run floating windows while they were playing VR games. This made it possible to look up YouTube videos or run chat apps while playing games, making the Quest feel more like a PC VR experience.
When my Meta Quest 3 got the v83 public test firmware this week, I noticed that the seamless multitasking feature was no longer in the experimental settings section. Sure enough, it looks like Meta has marked this one as no longer a beta feature and has launched it as part of the big UI overhaul, called Navigator.
To test this out, I charged up my Meta Quest 3 and my Kiwi Design K4 headstrap, launched Asgard’s Wrath 2 (the largest game on the Quest), and then loaded up a bunch of YouTube videos, a browser window with X (Twitter) loaded, as well as the Meta Horizon discovery feed. You can see a screenshot of my setup above.
I then let the headset run with all this happening until it completely died, checking every 20 minutes and moving around in the game to ensure things were still working. After all those hours, I never saw Asgard’s Wrath 2 crash. Instead, when memory clearly got low during a loading sequence in the game, the 2D apps reloaded themselves.
We’ll need wider testing and user reports to ensure the bug has been properly squashed, but I’m feeling pretty confident after this test that this massive problem has finally been resolved.
I would not recommend users switch to PTC v83 unless they’re already on the channel, as you have to perform a full factory reset in order to go back to stable firmware. Meta typically rolls out these public test firmware versions 2-3 weeks after they enter public testing, so I would expect all users to receive this update sometime later in November.
In the meantime, apps like Quest Games Optimizer may also help. If you’re testing v83, let us know if you find the system to be more stable and if the low memory crashing problems are gone! We’ll continue testing until then.
