Help - Oculus link on old graphics hardware... possible?

Lee Cramman · 13 Apr 2021 at 17:39

My first post...

I received an Oculus Quest 2 as a gift. As a cynical (and slightly geriatric) PC gamer I didn't expect much from it but was blown away by the value and fun of it all.

I've caught the bug a bit and want to use my PC via the Oculus link cable so that I can play Steam VR games and also so I can play with other people in the room who can spectate without the horrible lag that casting introduces (esp in pacey stuff like BeatSaber).

I was waiting for Nvidia 3000 series cards to arrive to upgrade my venerable but dependable R9 280x and... well, we can all guess how that went for me :rolleyes:

.

The old card can still handle 1080p for most things I want to play (although not at high frame rates).

Ideally I my plan is to maybe play some VR stuff on the 280x with the quality dialled down until I can get a new GPU or maybe sell a kidney. I realise R9 280x is 'not supported' but I had assumed it would still work but would just be a bit 'sub-optimal'.

However, I've had zero luck with it. My link cable is in place and the USB test says my speed is 1.1Gbps. The Quest shows up in the Oculus Windows app without issue.

However, if I try to launch anything I get a black window on the PC and absolutely nothing on the Quest. Nothing, nada, zup, bupkis... If I try something on Steam VR it can see my headset but not my controllers and it keeps telling me to wake the headset even though it is awake.

Also, if I try to buy an Oculus app it tells me that I don't have touch controllers (I do, the app says they're connected).

Drivers look good, cable being connected is recognised (as allow / deny pop-up appears), the Quest shows up correctly under Windows drivers and, as I said before, the Quest is recognised by the Windows Oculus app.

Am I just barking up the wrong tree here? Will this simply never work at all or is some part of my install borked and, if I put the effort in, I'll be rewarded with something that at least works. I can't find an answer to this anywhere.

I can get a (supported) GTX 970 for £160 to tide me over but I don't really want to pour more GPU money down the drain than I have to.

Answers on a postcard please. Particularly interested in anyone who has got this working on an older, unsupported AMD GPU.

Cheers

melmac · 13 Apr 2021 at 18:10

@Lee Cramman It's just not possible. Sorry.

The 280X is not just sub optimal, it just won't work with the Quest 2. Even if you could somehow get it to work, the experience would be terrible. It's not like running games on a PC. You need to maintain a consistent FPS or else it will make you very, very sick.

I wouldn't bother with a GTX 970 either. It's going to work, but, it will be pretty bad.

Any more questions, just ask.

Lee Cramman · 13 Apr 2021 at 19:12

melmac said:
@Lee Cramman It's just not possible. Sorry.

The 280X is not just sub optimal, it just won't work with the Quest 2. Even if you could somehow get it to work, the experience would be terrible. It's not like running games on a PC. You need to maintain a consistent FPS or else it will make you very, very sick.

I wouldn't bother with a GTX 970 either. It's going to work, but, it will be pretty bad.

Any more questions, just ask.

Cheers bud. Good to know. Guess the idea will just have to go back on the shelf for 6-12 months.

godinman · 13 Apr 2021 at 19:15

Could always pickup a 1070ti/1080 to tide you over? The way the market is you probably wouldn't lose out that much selling it once you get a 3000.

drakulton · 13 Apr 2021 at 22:03

I'm currently running a 780Ti and it's not a great experience on anything other than the home room.

Lee Cramman · 14 Apr 2021 at 10:43

Thanks guys.

godinman said:
Could always pickup a 1070ti/1080 to tide you over? The way the market is you probably wouldn't lose out that much selling it once you get a 3000.

Assuming I could find one for something vaguely approaching sensible money, I'm guessing that once availability / price of current gen cards is somewhere approaching 'normal' the current inflated prices of those cards will disappear (as the market will start to become flooded) so it would probably end up being sold for a considerable loss when I finally can upgrade.

The alternative is that this is the new reality, things will never be 'normal' again and the financial threshold of entry for decent quality PC gaming has seen a vast and permanent cost increase. In which case, I'm out

.

godinman · 14 Apr 2021 at 11:14

That's a good point, such a shame how the market is at the moment.

There's still a good amount of standalone games to tide you over. :cool:

Ravenger · 14 Apr 2021 at 11:37

godinman said:
That's a good point, such a shame how the market is at the moment.

There's still a good amount of standalone games to tide you over.

Plus some great side-loaded games like Doom 3, RTCW, and Half-Life

melmac · 14 Apr 2021 at 11:59

Lee Cramman said:
Thanks guys.

Assuming I could find one for something vaguely approaching sensible money, I'm guessing that once availability / price of current gen cards is somewhere approaching 'normal' the current inflated prices of those cards will disappear (as the market will start to become flooded) so it would probably end up being sold for a considerable loss when I finally can upgrade.

The alternative is that this is the new reality, things will never be 'normal' again and the financial threshold of entry for decent quality PC gaming has seen a vast and permanent cost increase. In which case, I'm out .

I think the prices will return to more sane levels. It's just a matter of when. If I was you, I wouldn't buy any overpriced second hand card. They just aren't worth it at the moment. It's also the advantage that the Quest 2 has. You can play without been attached to PC.

You should do what @Ravenger said above. Get Sidequest and sideload some games. Doom 3 is excellent.

Lee Cramman · 14 Apr 2021 at 12:44

Ravenger said:
Plus some great side-loaded games like Doom 3, RTCW, and Half-Life

melmac said:
I think the prices will return to more sane levels. It's just a matter of when. If I was you, I wouldn't buy any overpriced second hand card. They just aren't worth it at the moment. It's also the advantage that the Quest 2 has. You can play without been attached to PC.

You should do what @Ravenger said above. Get Sidequest and sideload some games. Doom 3 is excellent.

I hope you're right about sane levels of pricing...

I've got sidequest but only used it to so far to sideload stuff to mod Beat Saber... I hadn't realised you could do much else with it so thanks for that, time for some Googling (and some self-congratulating myself for buying the unit with more onboard storage)!

I've had a look at options for tethered casting to PC to help with latency but sound is the real issue, esp in Beat Saber. I could live with Oculus onboard only gaming for a while if I could make it a batter shared experience...

NOP · 14 Apr 2021 at 13:01

I'm surprised it doesn't work at all. I ran my old Rift on a 2GB R9 285 for a while. Limiting on what you could run, but it gave it a go.

After upgrading to a Quest 2, on my Vega56 I had to roll back the AMD drivers to get it to work. Can't remember the version and I'm in Linux atm so can't check, sorry.

That also looks like quite a slow USB port, I was managing about 2.1Gbps. Even with an upgraded GPU you might need a PCIe to USB card.

melmac · 14 Apr 2021 at 16:57

NOP said:
I'm surprised it doesn't work at all. I ran my old Rift on a 2GB R9 285 for a while. Limiting on what you could run, but it gave it a go.

After upgrading to a Quest 2, on my Vega56 I had to roll back the AMD drivers to get it to work. Can't remember the version and I'm in Linux atm so can't check, sorry.

That also looks like quite a slow USB port, I was managing about 2.1Gbps. Even with an upgraded GPU you might need a PCIe to USB card.

His 280X would work on the Old Rift. Not well but it would run.

But the Quest 2 doesn't work the same. It's over USB. You have to encode the game and stream it across to the Quest 2 for it to decode and display. This where the older AMD GPUs fail for the Quest 2. They either have incompatible encoders or no hardware encoder at all.

Polaris and Vega GPUs do have encoders that work with the Quest 2.

His USB speeds are probably due to the the problems with V27 firmware. If you haven't V27 yet, then your speeds will be much better. They are rolling out V28 which should solve the problem.

barbel · 17 Apr 2021 at 13:11

I have a r9 290 and won't work and since. V27 update on quest2my link cable stopped working properly it keeps losing connection. With an anker usb3 cable
I am only trying to connect to pc to use sidequest which I can't now or can I?

melmac · 18 Apr 2021 at 12:37

barbel said:
I have a r9 290 and won't work and since. V27 update on quest2my link cable stopped working properly it keeps losing connection. With an anker usb3 cable
I am only trying to connect to pc to use sidequest which I can't now or can I?

There have been problems with the Oculus Link Connection since the V26 update and the V27 update made it worse. But, You should be able to connect to the Quest 2 using SideQuest. If you can't, that points to a faulty cable. If you don't have any other USB cable, try the charging cable that came with the Quest 2 and see can you connect to SideQuest with it.

Marius_ · 11 Dec 2021 at 22:02

As always, I am a bit late on the topic

But I do have a R9 290x, AMD FX 8320E and a Quest 1 and managed to get it to work via link (yay).
First and foremost, all statements above are true, the card is not supported, I guess because of the hardware encoding capabilities of the videostream. The R9 series does not support h265 via hardware. I am not sure, but this is my guess why it is not working out of the box.
But, now to the fun part, you can use the Oculus Diagnostics Tool to tweak the resolution of the videoencoding. Link starts working when using a lower resolution. You will experience framedrops and I do get a nasty blurry stripe horizontal through the center vision. But overall.... it works. You even can start SteamVR as application from Oculus. I have not tried any highclass game like Alyx as buying it for this hardware does not make any sense for me.

So, what do you need.
1. An USB 3 port and a certified cable. I have bought myself a USB 3.1 gen2 compatible cable and the Quest turned green in the Link menue.
2. Browse to "C:\Program Files\Oculus\Support\oculus-diagnostics\OculusDebugTool.exe". If you have installed Oculus with a different path, this might never work. I had to reinstall it on c: after I realized, that some paths seemed to be hardcoded in the software. This may have been changed in the meantime.
3. start OculusDebugTool.exe

Look for "Encode Resolution Width" (you may have to expand "Oculus link") . Write down the original value if you want to restore it later.
Change the value to 1440 to start with. Now Oculus Link will work.
you can try out different values, I have managed up to 1610. The resolution is higher but the syncing got worse. going even higher will end the connection (in my case) and you will be thrown back to a black screen in your Quest.
Going lower eg. 1280 improves overall look but becomes very blurry of course.

All the other parameter have made no noticable impact for me.

I would love to hear if this worked for you and with which settings. I know my computer is getting old but it is a formidable workstation and setting up a new machine would take months.

Have a great time and see you

Marius_ · 12 Dec 2021 at 00:24

Ok, now that i posted the above post, I figured it out how to neatly run a r9 290x with oculus link.
You will not get the best resolution, but I now have figured following tweaks in OculusDebugTool.exe
Encode Resolution Width: 1600 (up tp 1920 works now when disabling Dynamic Bitrate but becomes laggy)
Encode Dynamic Bitrate: DISABLED
Dynamic Bitrate Max: 0
Encode Bitrate (Mbps): 80 (lower than 40 create artefact when moving the head fast)

These Settings result in a relatively clean experience. I have played Project Cars Pagani Edition(its free) in Steamvr and it rocks!

R9 290x with Oculus Link does work!

If you do not use fixed bitrate, you will have all the mentioned problems from my first post!

ahhh, now i feel satisfied

MoNkeE · 12 Dec 2021 at 16:56

I really feel like I’m missing something in this sub forum, as my opinions on VR never seem to match the status quo.

As has been touched upon, Oculus Link will not work with an AMD R9 card out of the box or without the above tweaking. However you can simply use the Remote Desktop app, as this doesn’t use the same encoding as Link. You can even access the games through the Oculus store with Remote Desktop.

As for performance, on my daughter’s 290 (non-X), this has never caused issues with fps dips or motion sickness, so long as graphics settings are set appropriately. She’s played through Arizona Sunshine with me and Phasmophobia without issue.

Marius_ · 12 Dec 2021 at 17:16

MoNkeE said:
I really feel like I’m missing something in this sub forum, as my opinions on VR never seem to match the status quo.

As has been touched upon, Oculus Link will not work with an AMD R9 card out of the box or without the above tweaking. However you can simply use the Remote Desktop app, as this doesn’t use the same encoding as Link. You can even access the games through the Oculus store with Remote Desktop.

As for performance, on my daughter’s 290 (non-X), this has never caused issues with fps dips or motion sickness, so long as graphics settings are set appropriately. She’s played through Arizona Sunshine with me and Phasmophobia without issue.

Wait, what?
I have tried ALVR to get my Quest connected wirelessly and stumbled into a ton of issues... so I never tried Remote Desktop. Also I assumed, any game would be displayed in 2d on the virtual screen...

Please elaborate more on Quality and Set up. Buying Remote Desktop will solve all above problems??? This would be so great. How is your setup set-up :-)

.? Which things do we have to consider to reproduce your experience? Are you wireless on a 5gh or wired(is this an option on a quest when not using Link)

Please share your infos, I would love to try this

Kind regards

Ravenger · 12 Dec 2021 at 17:47

Remote desktop works well for the most part but it won't work with all Oculus PC games. Many do, but there are a few that don't.

MoNkeE · 12 Dec 2021 at 18:36

@Marius_ yep, you need 5g wifi for it, my daughter has a 5g access point sat on top of her PC which is hardwired to it, so she gets zero network issues.

Beyond that, she’s just using the Virtual Desktop app available via the Quest Store directly on the headset, and the streaming software for it on the OC (there’s a plethora of YouTube guides that will show you how to set this up).

I only own one game but the Oculus Store, which is Lone Echo. This worked fine via Remote Desktop.

Honestly found this a bizarre thread, genuine suggestions of buying a £300 second hand GPU instead of a £15 app….?