VR Link, how does it work ?

R3dRaven

R3dRaven

R3dRaven

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8 Feb 2012
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I own a quest 2 and pretty much only play games through steam or VR link, very rarely do I play it as a stand alone.

So here's my question. How does the quest use your graphics card when using the VR link that's plugged into a USB port not directly into the card ?

Unless I'm being very dumb here, VR through the link cables surely cannot be using the full potential of the card?
 
Yes, it's a compressed video stream so there is a loss in quality. Someone's bound to have done a side by side comparison of this vs DP output on YouTube (probably not ideal as this itself is compressed) the web somewhere.
 
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It also depends on how good your video card is at video encoding. Recent Nvidia cards tend to be much better than their AMD equivalents.

Other factors affect the quality such as encode width, bitrate, and refresh rate.

If you use the Oculus debug tool to set the max encode width for Quest 2 and a 500mbps bitrate then the quality over a link cable can be extremely good. You do need a monster graphics card to do that though.

I tend to use Airlink for the majority of use cases as that works well enough with minimal compression, however some games like Skyrim with dark, complex scenes look very compressed over Airlink, so need a link cable with the enhanced bitrate to render without obvious compression.
 
I've only got a 2060 super, so I have noticed a drop in quality on some occasions, especially when playing half life Alex.

I've not tried the airlink but I read that recently they updated the drivers on the quest that improved it a fair bit.

Thanks for the answer chaps
 
Airlink works great on Quest for the majority of games. Losing the tether is worth the compromise in visual quality.

For sims and other games where visual fidelity is paramount then the link cable with tweaked settings works best.

The annoying thing is that the settings in the Oculus debug tool affect both wired and wireless link, and setting max bitrate for wired will make wireless unusable due to lag and extremely low frame rates. Maybe that will change with Wireless 6E with hugely increased bandwidth which the Quest Pro supports, and probably the Quest 3 too.
 
i prefer the ease of airlink and not needing to use steamvr.
i must say, i can't see any difference between link cable and airlink quality wise.
 
Haze said:
Ease of air link? It's not different to loading virtual desktop....
Click to expand...
i need to run an app on my pc when using VD (the app messes with my sound output device which i don't like), i don't need an app with airlink (apart from oculus home which is running anyway to access games). there's far less options to tweak the connection in airlink, just bitrate, which suits me as i'm happy with the quality of airlink. i think VD is great it's just i prefer simplicity and running my games without steamvr, there's no option to not use steamvr with VD.
 
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