Qualcomm Unveils New Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 Chip For Mixed Reality Headsets

Qualcomm announced this morning the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2, a new version of the XR2 Gen 2 chip that powers Meta’s Quest 3 mixed reality headset. The Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 supports 4.3K resolution per eye at 90 FPS (up from 3K), and 12 or more cameras for tracking your head, eyes, hands, controllers, eyes, and everything else in your nearby environment.

The new chip also provides a 15% higher GPU and 20% higher CPU frequency compared to X2 Gen 2, as well as up to 8x better on-device AI performance. Hugo Swart, vice president and general manager of XR (extended reality) at Qualcomm said today that the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen will bring “spectacularly clear visuals to use cases such as room-scale screens, life-size overlays and virtual desktops.”

With Apple expected to launch its Vision Pro headset as soon as next month, Qualcomm and its partners need to keep working on spatial computing experiences that leverage the Android ecosystem. With the Quest 3 and Quest Pro, Meta has two mixed reality headsets on the market that use an operating system based on the Android Open Source Project. However, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google also announced last year that they were teaming up to develop next-gen extended reality experiences and products.

“Samsung is thrilled to collaborate with Qualcomm Technologies and Google in revolutionizing the mobile industry once more,” said Inkang Song, vice president and head of technology strategy team at Samsung. “With Samsung’s mobile expertise and our joint commitment, we aim to create the best-in-class XR experience for Galaxy users,” the exec added.

It will be interesting to see if Samsung uses its upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event on January 17 to announce new mixed reality (or “extended reality”) products. In the meantime, Qualcomm has also developed a new MR & VR reference design to help hardware manufacturers develop new products with its latest chip.