Oh. My. God. EVERYWHERE had absolutely no answer for me. You're literally the first person to finally address frame drops in SteamVR. After a year and a half of on and off googling. Thank you.
This comment earned him a sub. I have been using Linux full time for like 15 years now and the amount of times a similar thing has happened to me has been surprising. Or really any problem you are looking to solve. I sit there thinking there is no way I am the only person in the world with this problem xD.
Got myself a quest 3 and been using it with ALVR and my AMD card and i had severe stutters and fps drops. The ALVR discord even didn't had an answer for me and then he just casually mentions it in a side sentence...
Raytracing also has a 40% performance drop due to poor optimization. Linux optimizes for who's paying them, which is valve for the steam deck. Everything beyond steam deck will be horrible.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq.... what? You know that almost everything on Linux is open source and maintained by the community, and valve has done a ton of their own works and contribution to get the performance they did? And they paid codemasters (not Linux) to develop proton (Not linux)
I had no clue that Gnome finally implemented DRM leasing. It's such a shame how much they hold back the entire Linux desktop space by NACKing useful protocols or bikeshedding when every other desktop has approved or even implemented them.
They're definitely awkward, and oftentimes mess with perfectly good protocols, but I can at least respect the vision that they're _trying_ to have, where they want to either not have a feature or have it in a way that's excellently implemented. They just often go too far
@@issacdowling I _mostly_ agree, however there are also many protocols where they have not implemented them seemingly maliciously, such as SSD. CSD allows for their little perfect world, and there is zero harm in making that an opt-in mode just every every other desktop environment. Instead, they chose to only allow CSD, leading to huge headaches for devs who just want to make a distro-agnostics app.
awesome video, VR was the biggest thing that prevented me from switching to linux a few years back, i still think its not ready for me since i now make content for VR and any minor incompatibility would be devastating (lol) but its good to see that its being worked on and has some compatibility.
Are you using Flatpak? You need the native Steam OS binary for VR to work as the sandbox still doesn't let the flatpak version run as it needs very low level control.
@@gljames24 no native. The index just won't get recognised when connected. It does come up with a second monitor in KDE, with a very low res display option. Also tried direct mode from steamVR options.... Just a huge PITA
Yeah, my index gets recognized and everything, but the performance graph looks like a purple city, the image is laggy, but the desktop vrview looks fine. Not sure what it's caused by, but it works fine on windows. Also tried monado, but I can't get past the grey screen and get into a game.
One cool thing you can do with vr on linux is that you can play side-by-side stereoscopic games in vr. That includes nintendo 3ds with depth enabled. You can even use reshade to enable stereoscopic view to see depth in all games.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq It works fine through Wine. If by "Linux alternative" you mean vkBasalt, it just follows Linux logic, meaning you need to know what you're doing before you do it. If you don't like that approach, it just means Linux isn't for you.
@@cprn. I've tried basalt, it literally doesn't support the same level of shaders and the developer admits it. Not a Linux "thing", it's a developer thing, and I do use reshade through wine. Isn't reshade open source? Why can't there be a native version? Fork the code into basalt?
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq IDK the current state, but I used it some time ago with a StereoDepth3D shader (or something like that) on Kingdom Come Deliverance, and it worked just fine. I found reshade-steam-proton later on, and I've been using that ever since. TBH, I don't use it often because I don't find graphics that important. And yeah, Reshade is open source now, but I don't think there's much interest in porting it to Linux. It works as it is, and there isn't much to gain compared to the work it'd take. As for porting parts of it to vkBasalt... It works on Vulkan layer and Reshade on DirectX, I think. They differ quite a lot.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq Moving files around and not having a GUI is a Linux thing. It is commonly accepted and often preferred to have configs in text files, as well as to install new software modules by placing files in a correct branch of the mount tree. Those used to be main issues with vkBasalt (the user-unfriendliness). IDK about shaders support being not up-to-par with Reshade - I successfully used it for stereo 3D shaders few years back but found `reshade-steam-proton` since then.
Thank you SO much for making this video. I was really annoyed by the lack of quality youtube videos covering VR on Linux, so i'm really glad i stumbled upon your channel. Keep up the great work!
@@zwenkwiel816 The CPU is usually the bottleneck when rendering. Every frame the CPU has to tell the GPU what to draw. We call this a "draw call". Less draw calls is usually better. Back in the day they treated each eye as an entirely different camera. Thus leading to 2x the draw calls. Single pass stereo instancing makes it so the CPU only needs to make one draw call, and then the GPU figures out the rest. This is a bit oversimplified, but I hope it's helpful.
Good news is that it seems Steams next headset is a standalone which will run on SteamOS, a Linux distro. So that should greatly increase the compatibility for VR on Linux
Something that I wish worked, was that on windows, turning on my index controllers automatically started SteamVR, swapped the audio source to the index headphones, and had a frame interpolation feature called Motion Smoothing. When SteamVR is closed, it switches the audio source back to my headphones. Linux does not yet have this _as far as I am aware,_ at least Nobara Project 40 KDE Plasma Edition doesn't at the time I make this comment, and that's a huge roadblock for me when it comes to just getting rid of windows entirely, even though I really, really want to. Now, I'm thinking, later I can maybe try to solve the VR audio issue with qpwgraph somehow, but I haven't attempted it yet and don't know if that will do the job, I just know that without easy virtual desktop screen applications like Desktop+, some things are kind of a huge pain in the ass. At least VRChat is allegedly fully functional with Proton-RTSP. Another concern I have is that I play a lot of Flat2VR mods, like GZdoom VR and Risk of Rain 2 VR, and I'm wondering how those would work in proton.
I actually made it my little project for the holidays to get VR up and running on Linux. And although you need to set things up, it works just as well as it does in Windows!
Quoting Valve's FAQ: "SteamVR for Linux cannot run properly within the unsupported Steam Snap or Steam Flatpak packages as they break both Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) leasing and asynchronous reprojection. The native distribution package should be used instead."
@@elinoamrichter162 im pretty sure linux still isnt supported for steam link VR and im pretty sure its wireless only ( please correct me if im wrong on either of these points ). also, whats that launch option you mentioned?
Yes, although you basically NEED gpu passthrough and PCIE passthrough (if you don't pass through the entire PCIE device the headset has a stroke and doesn't work.) Vrchat has EAC which you need to configure your VM to bypass, but otherwise, it works great!
I do it everyday, yes. Do GPU passthrough and properly setup your hypervizor (not too hard nowadays). And you should even get close to native performance.
my experience is that alvr is pretty ok now with the latest few updates (needs less fiddling to get an ok-ish image and is a bit more stable), but the performance of steam vr on linux still sucks a lot, which doesn't help when I have a relatively 'low end' setup (laptop 2060) on windows I use virtual desktop, and had a pretty smooth experience with half life alyx, and the few moments frames started to drop in some areas the space warp made it not that noticeable. but on linux it is not a good experience, the game runs with a noticeable low frame rate that makes it nauseous to play, and when they drop too hard the screen just starts flickering, making it unplayable (and yes I've made sure multiple times its sing the gpu) at this point waiting until steam vr on linux is less buggy and laggy, and either it or alvr get some video smoothing like virtual desktop or oculus link
I literally just got a new desktop because my Surface Book 3 running VR games has always been finicky and I was tired of dealing with it *every single time* for *years* now haha, and I was thinking about installing Linux on my desktop, so you couldn't be any more helpful than you are in this video since this is literally the exact situation I'm in rn haha
How does VR work for non-game stuff? Its fairly rare but over the years quite a lot of VR shit has been made, notably those weird 360 youtube videos come to mind, but there has also been a lot of stuff that (I think) was made for the google cardboard thing. You can tell because the videos/images (when played normally) have two sides, sometimes it's top/bottom, sometimes it's left/right, sometimes they cover 360, sometimes 180, etc. (Tbh I'd wager like 50-80% is very much NSFW, but thats true of basically the entire internet and there is still a good bit of genuinely solid content thats built up over time) As a bit of a data hoarder myself I've actually found it strangely difficult to figure out some way to play/view non-game VR content. So far the only method I've found has been to use some free app for an old iPhone (don't recall the name of it) and use what is functionally a Google Cardboard kit. I've admittedly never been hugely into VR, but I'm curious if any of the content that was made for Cardboard-era playback is still actually (somewhat easily) viewable or not on modern hardware. It *_should_* be, but VR recording software also *_should_* default to recording the right eye since like 90% of people are right eye dominant, and yet there are countless videos on YT of people "aiming" a couple of inches to the left of their sights because the software recorded the wrong eye. ("This is trivial, it should be possible" doesn't account for human laziness/stupidity over complicating it)
My current experience has sadly not been good: My current PC was marketed as "VR ready" and it comes with GTX 1070 and i5, and back when it was still a Windows 10 PC games like H3VR and HL:A ran fine. My current headset is Valve Index! But since I switched to Linux Mint (currently on version 21.3 Cinnamon), SteamVR Home and HLA stutter constantly, there are tracking problems, Bluetooth fails, headset cameras fail, SteamVR it self causes unclosable black windows to appear (though restarting Cinnamon helps), trying to restart SteamVR causes missing application error, and Unity VR games are just unplayable for some reason. And of course I've tried the basic troubleshooting techniques, verifying, reinstalling and such. This PC is still capable of running some heavy games like Doom Eternal and Satisfactory, so I just attribute this problem to be with Steam VR it self. And many people seemingly don't have any problems with a similar setup. Why me? :,(
Ye, I have similar issues and I have a way more beefy pc than you since I`m running a 7900xtx. At first I had major issues with steam vr just having very high latency. Then I tried HL:A and unless I run linux 1.0 runtime It wont launch. But with the 1.0 runtime I have latency worse than anything I have experienced before. It wont even get past the valve guy.
I also have a 7900xtx (like paro2210 above) and Ryzen 9 7900x3D and my experience with Steam VR in linux was horrible. So I'll stick with windows 10 for my VR gaming for now.
@@shadowqiller When I first installed arch with kde plasma even steam vr would have extream lag. I reinstalled and now steam vr doesnt lag but HL:A does. I`m going to be testing linux vr from time to time and play what I can on linux. But I still have windows 10 on a separate disk mostly for vr.
Same for me. I used to use gtx 1080 and i5 with valve index and it worked perfectly on windows and I had those same issues as you on linux. You can get much better performance if you run HLA from the terminal instead without launching steam. Steamvr will launch without an embedded browser process that slows it down a lot. But the performance issues are in valves steamvr driver. There is now an alternative driver, look up monado valve index setup. Its using monado + libsurvive + opencomposite to completely replace the valve steamvr driver. This setup doesn't have the performance issues or bugs of valve steamvr. Unfortunately it's not the easiest to setup at the moment.
first time i ever heard about DRM in a context that isn't about digital restrictions. i've heard the acronym sometimes in @TheLinuxEXP news videos and now i wonder if there's anything i misinterpreted when hearing those acronyms.
envision is in a state where i have no troubles running pretty much anything. even when the frames drop it continues to be smooth unlike when frames dropped in alvr for me
I think with flatpak you can also share or allow cross sandbox talking but I can’t member the app to do that and I haven’t really tried it for VR or anything like that.
I'm thinking of getting either the Pico 4 or the Quest 2 used as I just bought a new AMD PC. I see that ALVR has support for both, they cost around the same and on paper when it comes PCVR use the Pico 4 is better. I'd really like to hear some more opinions on this.
I tried ALVR with the Quest 3, and it connected just fine, and the desktop VR-preview window showed that the tracking was working perfectly... but the remote world just showed up as a black nothingness. This was with a Radeon 5700XT, or rather, a Radeon Pro W5700. I wish Valve would make Steam Link VR officially work properly on Linux!
Dude!!! you are doing Gods Job! Playing in Linux get way more mainstream an VR is one of the only reasons i stuck in Windows with VirtualDesktop cause it was easy a.f. 4 me and also cr-a-**--e-d games are playable. Do you have a small tutorial for a quick Setup to play VR in Linux? Would love to switch completey i use Nobara40 OS as distro for linux gaming in my second setup and have a Quest2. My bad i dont have so much time to spend it in a lot of tries, but would spend some dollars 4 a good tutorial that would save me a lot of time :D
I built my computer in 2018 with Intel & Nvidia. It's starting to show its age, so I plan on upgrading. I think my benchmark will be when Linux figures VR out, or when it dies. Cause then I can buy a headset with my new computer. I already use Linux, and have been for 4 years, so I've largely stayed out of anything to do with VR. I hope it becomes viable on Linux someday, better soon than later. But I'm more loyal to the open source revolution that's currently happening, than a glorified motion sickness machine.
Thanks for this update on the VR situation. I'm still not sure if I should take the plunge. I am still on Gnome 45 and also Wayland, which seem to be the most problematic parts for VR _today_.
I have tried for almost a year to make my HP Reverb G2 to work on my linux but at this point I practically gave up on it, my next alternative is either a Quest 3 with ALVR or a Vive 1, which one would you recommend me the most...?
Quest by far. The original Vive is very low resolution, and not something anybody should be seriously considering anymore on any OS, but - on Linux especially - there are still many issues with hard-wired headsets due to GPU weirdness, where ALVR (wired or wireless) doesn't suffer from the same things.
I need something like iVRy and Driver4VR but for Linux so I can play VR games without buying a VR headset/controllers. (I have an Android phone with a 2K 120Hz screen and at least Gyro for motion tracking, I have a 360 Kinect and the USB adapter for it, and few Wii Remotes.)
I have a Valve Index so Ive avoided a lot of issues in Windows and Linux, however playing Oculus titles in steamvr is a different story, works great in Windows, impossible in Linux. Im using primarily KDE - Wayland.
Unfortunately since Virtual Desktop isn't working on Linux and the builtin alternative didn't work either I still couldn't get my Pico 4 working with Linux.
The Surface Book is problematic for VR because of the weird optimus graphics setup. It doesn't matter if you're on Windows or Linux, the experience is bad. The USB-C DP output is actually physically attached to the Intel integrated GPU in the SoC, and the NVIDIA GPU is just dangling off the PCIe bus and has no actual display outputs of its own. This means that there's no "Direct Mode" support, since Intel display drivers don't support Direct Mode for VR. This means the only way to make it work is to use non-Direct Mode which hurts performance a lot. It also has to copy the entire frame buffer from the NVIDIA GPU to main memory to display anything at all, which really taxes both PCIe and main memory bandwidth. It also makes the Intel GPU draw lots of power, which eats the entire SoC's power budget, and causes excessive CPU throttling. The CPU has a hard enough time staying cool in the SB as it is. This basically means the Surface Book kinda sucks at gaming in general, and isn't good for VR. I have made it work, but always with extreme stuttering and poor performance. It's not NVIDIA's fault, it's Microsoft's fault for engineering the twin GPU architecture like this, all they needed to do to avoid the issue entirely is physically connect the USB-C DP output to the NVIDIA GPU in the base. It is what it is.
I'm aware of those issues (I thought I mentioned - or annotated a reddit screenshot with - the fact that things would likely perform poorly if they worked, and the fact that it _has_ worked on Windows). The point, mainly, isn't about the Surface Book in particular not working, but that this laptop which _does_ work in some small way on Windows _does not_ work on Linux
I never managed to get vr working properly on linux with alvr (maybe at some point like 1 game worked?), i'll try again tho hope i get it to work next time i try
Been exactly there, I wanted to build a steam machine for my living room with an AMD card because steam os only works with AMD and had huge stutters in vr. So I had to opt back to windows but it's not good as a gamepad controlled OS. Sad state
How's the performance in Linux vs Windows 11, for really demanding VR games? more specifically on the CPU side of things. I do flight sims (DCS, Falcon BMS) with a 14700k and 4090, and find I'm still CPU limited (mainly because those games are just dogshit on the windows scheduler...) in VR.
I want to know this too. All i care about is gzdoomvr and its limited CPU support. 3d modeled weapons and enemies just crush zgdoom. Linux+steamvr+gzdoomvr?
I wouldn't expect performance to be very different, though I can't speak for it much since I rarely play anything that my computer's not able to handle. Things _seem similar_, but I haven't measured _how_ similar
Got any advice on whether or not Rift S works on Linux at all? I've looked around and not found much. I'd bought the headset years ago when I had never even considered moving from Windows to Linux, and now I've realised that it seems basically impossible for the old Rift S to work at all on Linux. Any advice is greatly appreciated :)
It's my understanding that there are some basic drivers for it (only 3DoF) with very very experimental open source inside-out tracking being worked on for Monado, but it's likely not ready to be used, and I have no idea at all about controllers.
Great video! Sadly I have really bad reprojection issues with alvr. whenever I move my head, the screen glitches. I have a 6700xt, 12700k and a dedicated WIFI AP. Changing resolutions and quality settings does nothing.
@@xguitarist_ I just tried this like an hour ago, turning off legacy reprojection for beat saber helped a lot and now aside from general graphical and things moving around for fractions of seconds it's much smoother now especially moving my head. But this on blade and sorcery had the opposite effect, but that doesn't matter because blade and sorcery worked pretty well anyway. The only thing now is that I have occasional stutters. On blade and sorcery, I've found that my gpu is probably causing most of it using nvtop, But I don't what is causing it on blade and sorcery, especially since it works fine on windows. thanks!
Hi Isaac, I have a quest 2 and my computer is Manjaro Linux, I have alvr and steam vr running, it correctly detects the devices, the steamvr monitor shows activity, I can even see on the computer what should be seen in quest 2, however when I open ALVR in quest I only have a black screen, I have tried many things like adding commands when running steamvr, I don't have any errors in the logs. What can I do? My hardware is an nvidia rtx3050 gpu, I have the private drivers running correctly.
Updated video for all of this is coming soon, but generally you'll want to be looking at either WiVRn (nicer, more FOSS, less compatible) or ALVR (still nice, but less FOSS since it relies on SteamVR, but SteamVR means it's more compatible)
I’ve been trying to run vr from my steam deck to my quest . But I don’t want to install windows on deck . So I need to use Linux steam deck and quest 3 only . That what your trying to figure out ? Sorry watching now
Bad news. I tried the AMD fix and it didn't work. It just drops frames ALWAYS. Well, not always, but its bad. Even after setting the profile to VR and yeeting every ounce of power my 7900xtx has at it i maintain a ratio of generally 75% dropped frames in games like Half-Life alyx
Yeah, the valve steamvr driver is terrible on both amd and nvidia on linux. There is finally a solution now. There is an alternative steamvr driver (for valve index at least). Look up monado valve index setup. It's using monado + libsurvive + opencomposite to completely replace the valve steamvr driver. This driver doesn't have those performance issues! Unfortunately it's not the simplest to setup right now. Maybe it will be easier in the future.
You can also get much better performance in half life alyx if you run it from the terminal instead of starting up steam. That will prevent steamvr web browser processes from running and you get much better performance because of that. I managed to run half life alyx without lag on a gtx 1080 doing that.
My Quest 2 and Quest 3 have been an endless shit show and dumpster fire, and that's with them working standalone or connected through Quest Link and SideQuest to my computer running *Windows*. Windows itself is crap sabotaged by Microsoft so Microsoft can bring back that functionality and then market that as new features.
i think the reasons why vr games generally work better on linux than non vr ones is that: 1. many vr games are made for quest too and its os is based on android and this is based on linux 2. the vr game market is smaller which is why companies that are profit oriented dont make vr games and these companies probaply have kernel level anti cheats/viruses
okay this is super schizo. but like do you have a lesbian sister, and live in indiana? like sorry its just u look like super similar to someone i went to hs with and u have the same last name
get a freaking mic stand you moron. If you cant understand what a mic stand is for, I doubt you know anything about linux.
NUH UH
pin of shame
nun uh
bait
Critiquing a Linux user RUclipsr is like telling the LeBron James that he's gay when he's not. Pure manipulation
Oh. My. God. EVERYWHERE had absolutely no answer for me. You're literally the first person to finally address frame drops in SteamVR. After a year and a half of on and off googling. Thank you.
This comment earned him a sub. I have been using Linux full time for like 15 years now and the amount of times a similar thing has happened to me has been surprising. Or really any problem you are looking to solve. I sit there thinking there is no way I am the only person in the world with this problem xD.
Got myself a quest 3 and been using it with ALVR and my AMD card and i had severe stutters and fps drops. The ALVR discord even didn't had an answer for me and then he just casually mentions it in a side sentence...
google en passant
Raytracing also has a 40% performance drop due to poor optimization. Linux optimizes for who's paying them, which is valve for the steam deck. Everything beyond steam deck will be horrible.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq.... what? You know that almost everything on Linux is open source and maintained by the community, and valve has done a ton of their own works and contribution to get the performance they did? And they paid codemasters (not Linux) to develop proton (Not linux)
I had no clue that Gnome finally implemented DRM leasing. It's such a shame how much they hold back the entire Linux desktop space by NACKing useful protocols or bikeshedding when every other desktop has approved or even implemented them.
They're definitely awkward, and oftentimes mess with perfectly good protocols, but I can at least respect the vision that they're _trying_ to have, where they want to either not have a feature or have it in a way that's excellently implemented. They just often go too far
@@issacdowling I _mostly_ agree, however there are also many protocols where they have not implemented them seemingly maliciously, such as SSD. CSD allows for their little perfect world, and there is zero harm in making that an opt-in mode just every every other desktop environment. Instead, they chose to only allow CSD, leading to huge headaches for devs who just want to make a distro-agnostics app.
@@Zullfix You gave basically the perfect example, that decorations stuff is just needless stubbornness, I agree
Well, this is why I'm using Cosmic now. No I won't use KDE.
Gnome dragging their feet on DRM is baffling.
That’s what GNOME do best, along with causing similar delays in the upstream wayland protocol
Kde ftw
@@AnnCatsanndra gnome is generally baffling.
KDE all the way
@@Thanatos2996ahaha like kill meeeeee i thoight we had a microsoft to do better than
hopefully SteamOS will be able to mainstream VR on Linux for PCs so I can stop using Bills Gate
awesome video, VR was the biggest thing that prevented me from switching to linux a few years back, i still think its not ready for me since i now make content for VR and any minor incompatibility would be devastating (lol) but its good to see that its being worked on and has some compatibility.
im currently preparing a video tutorial step by step on how to install alvr on linux, i'll y'all are interested
VR is the only thing stopping me from deleting my windows partition. My index just wont get recognised on linux
Are you using Flatpak? You need the native Steam OS binary for VR to work as the sandbox still doesn't let the flatpak version run as it needs very low level control.
@@gljames24 no native. The index just won't get recognised when connected. It does come up with a second monitor in KDE, with a very low res display option. Also tried direct mode from steamVR options.... Just a huge PITA
Yeah, my index gets recognized and everything, but the performance graph looks like a purple city, the image is laggy, but the desktop vrview looks fine. Not sure what it's caused by, but it works fine on windows. Also tried monado, but I can't get past the grey screen and get into a game.
One cool thing you can do with vr on linux is that you can play side-by-side stereoscopic games in vr. That includes nintendo 3ds with depth enabled. You can even use reshade to enable stereoscopic view to see depth in all games.
Except reshade doesn't have a native Linux port. So you're running it through wine, and the Linux alternative program is garbage.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq It works fine through Wine. If by "Linux alternative" you mean vkBasalt, it just follows Linux logic, meaning you need to know what you're doing before you do it. If you don't like that approach, it just means Linux isn't for you.
@@cprn. I've tried basalt, it literally doesn't support the same level of shaders and the developer admits it. Not a Linux "thing", it's a developer thing, and I do use reshade through wine. Isn't reshade open source? Why can't there be a native version? Fork the code into basalt?
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq IDK the current state, but I used it some time ago with a StereoDepth3D shader (or something like that) on Kingdom Come Deliverance, and it worked just fine. I found reshade-steam-proton later on, and I've been using that ever since. TBH, I don't use it often because I don't find graphics that important.
And yeah, Reshade is open source now, but I don't think there's much interest in porting it to Linux. It works as it is, and there isn't much to gain compared to the work it'd take. As for porting parts of it to vkBasalt... It works on Vulkan layer and Reshade on DirectX, I think. They differ quite a lot.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq Moving files around and not having a GUI is a Linux thing. It is commonly accepted and often preferred to have configs in text files, as well as to install new software modules by placing files in a correct branch of the mount tree. Those used to be main issues with vkBasalt (the user-unfriendliness). IDK about shaders support being not up-to-par with Reshade - I successfully used it for stereo 3D shaders few years back but found `reshade-steam-proton` since then.
Thank you SO much for making this video. I was really annoyed by the lack of quality youtube videos covering VR on Linux, so i'm really glad i stumbled upon your channel. Keep up the great work!
Finally someone who knows about single pass stereo
Is that the thing where they basically render both eyes at once?
@@zwenkwiel816 The CPU is usually the bottleneck when rendering. Every frame the CPU has to tell the GPU what to draw. We call this a "draw call". Less draw calls is usually better. Back in the day they treated each eye as an entirely different camera. Thus leading to 2x the draw calls.
Single pass stereo instancing makes it so the CPU only needs to make one draw call, and then the GPU figures out the rest.
This is a bit oversimplified, but I hope it's helpful.
@@beanieteamie7435 so the GPU shifts the image slightly to make the view for the other eye?
Very useful video, thank you for being so thorough!
Good news is that it seems Steams next headset is a standalone which will run on SteamOS, a Linux distro. So that should greatly increase the compatibility for VR on Linux
Something that I wish worked, was that on windows, turning on my index controllers automatically started SteamVR, swapped the audio source to the index headphones, and had a frame interpolation feature called Motion Smoothing. When SteamVR is closed, it switches the audio source back to my headphones. Linux does not yet have this _as far as I am aware,_ at least Nobara Project 40 KDE Plasma Edition doesn't at the time I make this comment, and that's a huge roadblock for me when it comes to just getting rid of windows entirely, even though I really, really want to.
Now, I'm thinking, later I can maybe try to solve the VR audio issue with qpwgraph somehow, but I haven't attempted it yet and don't know if that will do the job, I just know that without easy virtual desktop screen applications like Desktop+, some things are kind of a huge pain in the ass. At least VRChat is allegedly fully functional with Proton-RTSP.
Another concern I have is that I play a lot of Flat2VR mods, like GZdoom VR and Risk of Rain 2 VR, and I'm wondering how those would work in proton.
I actually made it my little project for the holidays to get VR up and running on Linux.
And although you need to set things up, it works just as well as it does in Windows!
Quoting Valve's FAQ: "SteamVR for Linux cannot run properly within the unsupported Steam Snap or Steam Flatpak packages as they break both Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) leasing and asynchronous reprojection. The native distribution package should be used instead."
What do you use to play nonVR games in VR on Linux? Is there a native alternative to things like VorpX, TridefVR, OSVR? I never found any.
i would be more interested if ALVR gave me more than just a black screen
This is an issue solved by a launch option. Still runs worse than steam vr
@@elinoamrichter162 i have to use it because my headset is a quest 3.
if you know of any other link solutions than ALVR then please tell me!
@@elinoamrichter162 what do you mean runs worse than Steam VR?
AFAIK Steam VR cant natively link with a Quest 3 on linux.
@@ChrisDaGamer i meant steam link for vr
@@elinoamrichter162 im pretty sure linux still isnt supported for steam link VR and im pretty sure its wireless only ( please correct me if im wrong on either of these points ).
also, whats that launch option you mentioned?
I never get a straight answer, can you do vr in a virtual machine?
I've done it, yes.
@@issacdowling sick, thank you
Yes, although you basically NEED gpu passthrough and PCIE passthrough (if you don't pass through the entire PCIE device the headset has a stroke and doesn't work.)
Vrchat has EAC which you need to configure your VM to bypass, but otherwise, it works great!
I do it everyday, yes. Do GPU passthrough and properly setup your hypervizor (not too hard nowadays). And you should even get close to native performance.
my experience is that alvr is pretty ok now with the latest few updates (needs less fiddling to get an ok-ish image and is a bit more stable), but the performance of steam vr on linux still sucks a lot, which doesn't help when I have a relatively 'low end' setup (laptop 2060)
on windows I use virtual desktop, and had a pretty smooth experience with half life alyx, and the few moments frames started to drop in some areas the space warp made it not that noticeable. but on linux it is not a good experience, the game runs with a noticeable low frame rate that makes it nauseous to play, and when they drop too hard the screen just starts flickering, making it unplayable (and yes I've made sure multiple times its sing the gpu)
at this point waiting until steam vr on linux is less buggy and laggy, and either it or alvr get some video smoothing like virtual desktop or oculus link
this shirt gotta be a promotional gift xD
I literally just got a new desktop because my Surface Book 3 running VR games has always been finicky and I was tired of dealing with it *every single time* for *years* now haha, and I was thinking about installing Linux on my desktop, so you couldn't be any more helpful than you are in this video since this is literally the exact situation I'm in rn haha
And here I spend days busting my balls with GNOME... Ugh.
Well, I ain't switching so I guess I'll have to keep up with whatever that is and wait.
How does VR work for non-game stuff? Its fairly rare but over the years quite a lot of VR shit has been made, notably those weird 360 youtube videos come to mind, but there has also been a lot of stuff that (I think) was made for the google cardboard thing. You can tell because the videos/images (when played normally) have two sides, sometimes it's top/bottom, sometimes it's left/right, sometimes they cover 360, sometimes 180, etc. (Tbh I'd wager like 50-80% is very much NSFW, but thats true of basically the entire internet and there is still a good bit of genuinely solid content thats built up over time)
As a bit of a data hoarder myself I've actually found it strangely difficult to figure out some way to play/view non-game VR content. So far the only method I've found has been to use some free app for an old iPhone (don't recall the name of it) and use what is functionally a Google Cardboard kit.
I've admittedly never been hugely into VR, but I'm curious if any of the content that was made for Cardboard-era playback is still actually (somewhat easily) viewable or not on modern hardware. It *_should_* be, but VR recording software also *_should_* default to recording the right eye since like 90% of people are right eye dominant, and yet there are countless videos on YT of people "aiming" a couple of inches to the left of their sights because the software recorded the wrong eye. ("This is trivial, it should be possible" doesn't account for human laziness/stupidity over complicating it)
This was quite helpful, thanks!
Thanks for that AMD thing... Very helpful
Btw Hyprland does not use wlroots anymore, Vaxtry made his own.
Yeah and that broke the VR support.
My current experience has sadly not been good: My current PC was marketed as "VR ready" and it comes with GTX 1070 and i5, and back when it was still a Windows 10 PC games like H3VR and HL:A ran fine. My current headset is Valve Index!
But since I switched to Linux Mint (currently on version 21.3 Cinnamon), SteamVR Home and HLA stutter constantly, there are tracking problems, Bluetooth fails, headset cameras fail, SteamVR it self causes unclosable black windows to appear (though restarting Cinnamon helps), trying to restart SteamVR causes missing application error, and Unity VR games are just unplayable for some reason.
And of course I've tried the basic troubleshooting techniques, verifying, reinstalling and such.
This PC is still capable of running some heavy games like Doom Eternal and Satisfactory, so I just attribute this problem to be with Steam VR it self. And many people seemingly don't have any problems with a similar setup. Why me? :,(
Ye, I have similar issues and I have a way more beefy pc than you since I`m running a 7900xtx. At first I had major issues with steam vr just having very high latency. Then I tried HL:A and unless I run linux 1.0 runtime It wont launch. But with the 1.0 runtime I have latency worse than anything I have experienced before. It wont even get past the valve guy.
I experience all of the same issues on ALVR on arch. VR on linux is not great rn tbh.
I also have a 7900xtx (like paro2210 above) and Ryzen 9 7900x3D and my experience with Steam VR in linux was horrible. So I'll stick with windows 10 for my VR gaming for now.
@@shadowqiller When I first installed arch with kde plasma even steam vr would have extream lag. I reinstalled and now steam vr doesnt lag but HL:A does. I`m going to be testing linux vr from time to time and play what I can on linux. But I still have windows 10 on a separate disk mostly for vr.
Same for me. I used to use gtx 1080 and i5 with valve index and it worked perfectly on windows and I had those same issues as you on linux. You can get much better performance if you run HLA from the terminal instead without launching steam. Steamvr will launch without an embedded browser process that slows it down a lot. But the performance issues are in valves steamvr driver. There is now an alternative driver, look up monado valve index setup. Its using monado + libsurvive + opencomposite to completely replace the valve steamvr driver. This setup doesn't have the performance issues or bugs of valve steamvr. Unfortunately it's not the easiest to setup at the moment.
first time i ever heard about DRM in a context that isn't about digital restrictions. i've heard the acronym sometimes in @TheLinuxEXP news videos and now i wonder if there's anything i misinterpreted when hearing those acronyms.
envision is in a state where i have no troubles running pretty much anything. even when the frames drop it continues to be smooth unlike when frames dropped in alvr for me
I think with flatpak you can also share or allow cross sandbox talking but I can’t member the app to do that and I haven’t really tried it for VR or anything like that.
I had to switch to the binary directly from Valve. The flatpak wasn't working for me in VR.
I'm thinking of getting either the Pico 4 or the Quest 2 used as I just bought a new AMD PC. I see that ALVR has support for both, they cost around the same and on paper when it comes PCVR use the Pico 4 is better. I'd really like to hear some more opinions on this.
Also idk if i could play Lutris games in VR as I wanna play Richard Burns Rally in VR, that and other Sim Racing Games are my main Use cases
I tried ALVR with the Quest 3, and it connected just fine, and the desktop VR-preview window showed that the tracking was working perfectly... but the remote world just showed up as a black nothingness. This was with a Radeon 5700XT, or rather, a Radeon Pro W5700.
I wish Valve would make Steam Link VR officially work properly on Linux!
From my experience it's an off and on headache when it works it's perfectly fine though minus not having motion smoothing
Dude!!! you are doing Gods Job! Playing in Linux get way more mainstream an VR is one of the only reasons i stuck in Windows with VirtualDesktop cause it was easy a.f. 4 me and also cr-a-**--e-d games are playable.
Do you have a small tutorial for a quick Setup to play VR in Linux? Would love to switch completey
i use Nobara40 OS as distro for linux gaming in my second setup and have a Quest2. My bad i dont have so much time to spend it in a lot of tries, but would spend some dollars 4 a good tutorial that would save me a lot of time :D
I had problems with the flatpak using steam. It wouldn't run SteamVR at all and I switched to the binary from Valve and it worked.
I built my computer in 2018 with Intel & Nvidia. It's starting to show its age, so I plan on upgrading. I think my benchmark will be when Linux figures VR out, or when it dies. Cause then I can buy a headset with my new computer. I already use Linux, and have been for 4 years, so I've largely stayed out of anything to do with VR. I hope it becomes viable on Linux someday, better soon than later. But I'm more loyal to the open source revolution that's currently happening, than a glorified motion sickness machine.
Thanks for this update on the VR situation. I'm still not sure if I should take the plunge. I am still on Gnome 45 and also Wayland, which seem to be the most problematic parts for VR _today_.
I have tried for almost a year to make my HP Reverb G2 to work on my linux but at this point I practically gave up on it, my next alternative is either a Quest 3 with ALVR or a Vive 1, which one would you recommend me the most...?
Quest by far. The original Vive is very low resolution, and not something anybody should be seriously considering anymore on any OS, but - on Linux especially - there are still many issues with hard-wired headsets due to GPU weirdness, where ALVR (wired or wireless) doesn't suffer from the same things.
I need something like iVRy and Driver4VR but for Linux so I can play VR games without buying a VR headset/controllers.
(I have an Android phone with a 2K 120Hz screen and at least Gyro for motion tracking, I have a 360 Kinect and the USB adapter for it, and few Wii Remotes.)
I have a Valve Index so Ive avoided a lot of issues in Windows and Linux, however playing Oculus titles in steamvr is a different story, works great in Windows, impossible in Linux. Im using primarily KDE - Wayland.
Small correction: Hyprland is not using wlroots anymore
Unfortunately since Virtual Desktop isn't working on Linux and the builtin alternative didn't work either I still couldn't get my Pico 4 working with Linux.
I would switch to Linux and ALVR... but I can't that 20 bucks I spent on Virtual Desktop 4 years back go to waste. Not a single major issue, ever.
The Surface Book is problematic for VR because of the weird optimus graphics setup. It doesn't matter if you're on Windows or Linux, the experience is bad. The USB-C DP output is actually physically attached to the Intel integrated GPU in the SoC, and the NVIDIA GPU is just dangling off the PCIe bus and has no actual display outputs of its own.
This means that there's no "Direct Mode" support, since Intel display drivers don't support Direct Mode for VR. This means the only way to make it work is to use non-Direct Mode which hurts performance a lot. It also has to copy the entire frame buffer from the NVIDIA GPU to main memory to display anything at all, which really taxes both PCIe and main memory bandwidth. It also makes the Intel GPU draw lots of power, which eats the entire SoC's power budget, and causes excessive CPU throttling. The CPU has a hard enough time staying cool in the SB as it is.
This basically means the Surface Book kinda sucks at gaming in general, and isn't good for VR. I have made it work, but always with extreme stuttering and poor performance. It's not NVIDIA's fault, it's Microsoft's fault for engineering the twin GPU architecture like this, all they needed to do to avoid the issue entirely is physically connect the USB-C DP output to the NVIDIA GPU in the base. It is what it is.
I'm aware of those issues (I thought I mentioned - or annotated a reddit screenshot with - the fact that things would likely perform poorly if they worked, and the fact that it _has_ worked on Windows). The point, mainly, isn't about the Surface Book in particular not working, but that this laptop which _does_ work in some small way on Windows _does not_ work on Linux
We need to get Unity to support OpenXR on their Linux builds!
Besides ALVR, have you ever tries WiVRN?
Yes, a video about it should come out at some point this year
I guess now that Windows won't operate some of the older VR headsets.Maybe linux should step up to the plate.
ive had weird issues with steam chosing my igfx instead of discreet, just disable integrated in bios and its no longer an issue, very linux issue lmao
I want the Steamlink VR feature to work with Linux. That would be awsome :D
How do I fix the black screen
For me the VR Performance profile didn't work for me, I just use the high profile
i use ALVR on my quest 3 of all things, half life alyx wants proton experimental
I never managed to get vr working properly on linux with alvr (maybe at some point like 1 game worked?), i'll try again tho hope i get it to work next time i try
Been exactly there, I wanted to build a steam machine for my living room with an AMD card because steam os only works with AMD and had huge stutters in vr. So I had to opt back to windows but it's not good as a gamepad controlled OS. Sad state
How's the performance in Linux vs Windows 11, for really demanding VR games? more specifically on the CPU side of things.
I do flight sims (DCS, Falcon BMS) with a 14700k and 4090, and find I'm still CPU limited (mainly because those games are just dogshit on the windows scheduler...) in VR.
I want to know this too. All i care about is gzdoomvr and its limited CPU support. 3d modeled weapons and enemies just crush zgdoom. Linux+steamvr+gzdoomvr?
I wouldn't expect performance to be very different, though I can't speak for it much since I rarely play anything that my computer's not able to handle. Things _seem similar_, but I haven't measured _how_ similar
Got any advice on whether or not Rift S works on Linux at all?
I've looked around and not found much. I'd bought the headset years ago when I had never even considered moving from Windows to Linux, and now I've realised that it seems basically impossible for the old Rift S to work at all on Linux.
Any advice is greatly appreciated :)
It's my understanding that there are some basic drivers for it (only 3DoF) with very very experimental open source inside-out tracking being worked on for Monado, but it's likely not ready to be used, and I have no idea at all about controllers.
Curious how well half life alyx works, better native or through proton?
waiting for someone to make the windows mixed reality helmets completely compatible for linux lol
Great video! Sadly I have really bad reprojection issues with alvr. whenever I move my head, the screen glitches. I have a 6700xt, 12700k and a dedicated WIFI AP. Changing resolutions and quality settings does nothing.
Have you tried the per application video settings and switching to legacy reprojection? I’ve seen people say it helps with issues like that
@@xguitarist_ I just tried this like an hour ago, turning off legacy reprojection for beat saber helped a lot and now aside from general graphical and things moving around for fractions of seconds it's much smoother now especially moving my head. But this on blade and sorcery had the opposite effect, but that doesn't matter because blade and sorcery worked pretty well anyway.
The only thing now is that I have occasional stutters. On blade and sorcery, I've found that my gpu is probably causing most of it using nvtop, But I don't what is causing it on blade and sorcery, especially since it works fine on windows.
thanks!
The only time I touched Linux VR was on Steam Deck, and setting it up was pain
Ok so wireless pico 4. Trackers and use LIV to superimpose my avatar for streaming. I have tried many places and all I get is silence. Is it possible?
Thanks, British Steve.
funny thing that alvr dosent work for me and i have steam 307 error
Hi Isaac, I have a quest 2 and my computer is Manjaro Linux, I have alvr and steam vr running, it correctly detects the devices, the steamvr monitor shows activity, I can even see on the computer what should be seen in quest 2, however when I open ALVR in quest I only have a black screen, I have tried many things like adding commands when running steamvr, I don't have any errors in the logs. What can I do? My hardware is an nvidia rtx3050 gpu, I have the private drivers running correctly.
Any chance we will get a video on Pico 4 on Linux?
I don't have the headset anymore, but I covered this when I reviewed it last year, so you can find that there
Edit: Spelling
any idea if there's a solution for virtual desktop?
Updated video for all of this is coming soon, but generally you'll want to be looking at either WiVRn (nicer, more FOSS, less compatible) or ALVR (still nice, but less FOSS since it relies on SteamVR, but SteamVR means it's more compatible)
@@issacdowling nice, looking forward to the new vid
Wut? Beat Saber on the DK1? I gotta see that lol.
redo this video with more visuals it makes it more compelling with also good sounding royalty-free music
I’ve been trying to run vr from my steam deck to my quest . But I don’t want to install windows on deck . So I need to use Linux steam deck and quest 3 only . That what your trying to figure out ? Sorry watching now
RDNA gpu... so it's a RX 7900 XTX?
RDNA could be anything from an RX 5500 to 7900XTX, but I'm specifically on RDNA2, a 6800, so not nearly as powerful as the 7900XTX, but still good.
Bad news. I tried the AMD fix and it didn't work. It just drops frames ALWAYS. Well, not always, but its bad. Even after setting the profile to VR and yeeting every ounce of power my 7900xtx has at it i maintain a ratio of generally 75% dropped frames in games like Half-Life alyx
I've been banging my head against a wall for this specific issue since the first January the 7900xtx was released
Auto profile switching didn't work for me, I just set a manual profile with everything maxxed whenever I play. Maybe that will help you?
Yeah, the valve steamvr driver is terrible on both amd and nvidia on linux. There is finally a solution now. There is an alternative steamvr driver (for valve index at least). Look up monado valve index setup. It's using monado + libsurvive + opencomposite to completely replace the valve steamvr driver. This driver doesn't have those performance issues!
Unfortunately it's not the simplest to setup right now. Maybe it will be easier in the future.
You can also get much better performance in half life alyx if you run it from the terminal instead of starting up steam. That will prevent steamvr web browser processes from running and you get much better performance because of that. I managed to run half life alyx without lag on a gtx 1080 doing that.
try setting the profile to fixed high, thats what worked for me
My Quest 2 and Quest 3 have been an endless shit show and dumpster fire, and that's with them working standalone or connected through Quest Link and SideQuest to my computer running *Windows*. Windows itself is crap sabotaged by Microsoft so Microsoft can bring back that functionality and then market that as new features.
I like flatpaks but using steam and IDEs as a flatpak just sucks and should be avoided
IDEs I agree with, Steam I much prefer as a Flatpak
Hi guys Steve from gamers nexus here... Today we invented a time machine
i think the reasons why vr games generally work better on linux than non vr ones is that:
1. many vr games are made for quest too and its os is based on android and this is based on linux
2. the vr game market is smaller which is why companies that are profit oriented dont make vr games and these companies probaply have kernel level anti cheats/viruses
"we're all using steamvr" lol, no
why do u have trans girl rizz 💀❤
Not owning a blåhaj, I wouldn't know
lmao I was thinking the same thing 😶
Can only see a talking person instead of linux.
Streich Views
Just another reason to not use Linux I guess
okay this is super schizo. but like do you have a lesbian sister, and live in indiana? like sorry its just u look like super similar to someone i went to hs with and u have the same last name
All good (don't need to say sorry), but no, I'm in England
This wasn't helpful at all
I don't own vr, why is this recommended to me,