Scene looks different in Android/Quest preview vs Desktop (emissive color and lighting issue)

TeErMiNkAa · March 23, 2026, 10:39pm

Hi everyone,

I am working on a VR project in Unreal Engine (UE 5.7) targeting Meta Quest (Android).

I am having an issue where my scene looks very different when switching from Desktop preview to Android (Mobile / Android Generic XR preview).

Main differences:

The emissive material color changes (from strong red on desktop to pinkish on Android)
Lighting looks flatter and less intense
Overall tone and brightness are different

What I am using:

PostProcessVolume (Infinite Extent enabled)
Emissive material for a glowing artifact
SpotLight + Directional Light
Android (ASTC) build target

I attached screenshots showing the difference (Desktop vs Android preview).

My questions:

Is this expected behavior due to mobile rendering limitations?
Could this be caused by exposure, tonemapping, or Mobile HDR?
What is the best way to make the Android version look closer to the Desktop version?

Target device: Meta Quest 3 (standalone VR, mobile renderer)

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Countsie · March 24, 2026, 3:50am

For meta quest 3 you are limited in texture samplers. Your emissive issues might be due to that. Pack your channels to work around this. Most of my materials use only 1 or maybe 2 texture samples on quest.

Post-process and mobile HDR on that platform is very expensive, I would avoid it unless for a very constrained scene. If you’re using the meta quest branch of unreal you can use the tone-mapper for some effects, far better performance:

The lighting is calculated differently for android and feature sets for lights are not the same, esp if you’re comparing deferred(unreal’s default) to forward rendering.