Virtual Desktop is the best, very reliable. Something to be mentioned is that It also has Chroma Key Passthrough and Snapdragon Game Super Resolution for lower-end specs
Excellent video with awesome presentation. I'm going to subscribe because you sincerely deserve it. THIS IS HOW TO KEEP PEOPLE ENGAGED WITH CONTENT GUYS !
For me VD all the way. I bought it back in the day for my Oculus Go, just to be able to connect to my PC. It worked well. Later I bought it again for my first Quest, but the Quest2 and 3 could use that version again. And I would never have bought a Pico4, if it wouldn't have had Virtual Desktop. Now I upgraded to the Pico4 Ultra and my VD works on that as well with no problems. Tried airlink and Steam link and nearly every time I have to connect to my PC via VD in order to make Steam Link running. Of all programs VD delivers like you said.
@@Stereo3DProductions I like it a lot. It's much lighter to wear compared to the Quest 3. And if you're into 3D like I am, it's also a great 3D camera. Last week, I took it on a trip and captured some photos at a temple. The pictures are side-by-side (SBS) and nice and sharp. The videos are spatial, but I haven't found a program yet to convert them into 3D SBS format. That was one of my main reasons for getting it, as a 3D camera costs nearly the same.
@@Stereo3DProductionsYes, you should. I went on a bicycle trip this week to a nearby dam. I brought the Ultra again with me and before I started cycling over the dam, I went into the shadow of some trees and put my headset on. Took pictures an videos while crossing the dam. It works better than with a regular camera. Gonna bring it today again on my bicycle trip and will record parts of it.
I post a lot on my second channel, but it's a lot more off-the-cuff and unscripted... I'm gonna try to ramp up production on this channel over the fall!
The VirtualDesktop I run at all maxed settings, sharpness and the snapdragon sharpener. In steam, I run it at 70% supersampling to offset the hardware power from pc to headset to simply focus on making the Image as beautiful as possible. 72fps, and godlike as well.
Just in case people need some tips, double pressing the left system button while in Virtual Desktop quickly switches you to Desktop mode from VR and to VR mode from Desktop. I use that alot when needing a higher quality desktop window.
If you're interested on some extra testing, here are some things I've found Steam link has the Best latency, meaning it's really good for beat saber or ragnarock, but the frame drops only really disappear at 80 bitrate which isn't good, I also had the quality increase at 200% render res, but you must restart the game for it to apply (steam doesn't tell you) Even with this, both oculus and virtual desktop still look miles better even if left at default settings An additional note is that quest pro has eye tracked decoding on steam link, meaning you can set the encode res to be at its lowest and you shouldn't see a difference as it's only putting effort on decoding where you're looking at, even then idk what happens with steam link that it looks really bad Now as for oculus, if you still have your 1060, you may see that Oculus link is unusable if you use steamVR, I don't know why but having both oculus and steam takes away about 30% of your performance, and only really affects old cards, as an addition, recording or streaming on OBS while using Oculus at 120fps is basically impossible on anything that's not a 4070ti or higher, oculus loves to take tons of encoder resource and only cards with 2 encode Chips (4070ti +) can handle the quest stream + obs at the same time Finally I don't have anything to say about virtual desktop, it's just very consistent with such an abundant amount of system setups, it's really good
Steam Link is so frustrating in the end. If you softball the encoder resolution width it actually performs super decently. If they put another round of crunch time on it I can't help but think they would manage to improve the encoder resolution width issue and get us twice the pixels with the same smooth performance. Keep in mind that rendering at 200% with Steam Link is mostly pointless given the encoder res width is so low it downscales your render, which in turn gets upscaled in the headset. Also I had a GTX 1080, never had a 1060. For encoder limitations, the best way to record video on OBS is to enable IntelHD on your system and use QuickSync in OBS to record. This frees up both your CPU and your GPU's dedicated encoder for wireless VR, while the dedicated encoder on IntelHD handles the video recording. I have had to do this myself because I am trying to shift over to higher res captures.
Oh btw I'm also annoyed that Steam Link actually uses the eye tracking for encoding, because from the on board recordings I have it's not even doing static sliced encoding on Quest 3. VD and Airlink both do. (Oh that happens to be because of the 1536 ERW, because of course Steam Link is special and reinvents what ERW means)
19:23 Just wondering why when you connect to WiFi 5g you can only get 866 mbps because normally only Quest 3 can receive WiFi 5g at 2,400 mbps. What model router are you using?
I'm using TP-Link AX3000 for 5GHz 2402 Mbps and 2.4 GHz 574 Mbps (2.4GHz turned off) and it runs 2400 Mbps on my Quest 3 with VD all the time. For other people who has the highend hardwares but still having a bad performance. Check If your router has the following specifications. - WiFi 5/6/6E/7 - 802.11ac/ax - Minimum 2402 Mbps on Wireless 5.0 GHz * this is what you need for the Quest 3* (Quest 2 Max at ~1200 Mbps) - Connect this router ** directly to PC with a LAN cable ** (Check the LAN connection speed on the Ethernet Status window. It should be 1.0 Gbps or above) - Connect the Quest 2/3 on WiFi 5GHz and Turn off 2.4 GHz - Use this router for your Quest 3 only (Keep the password a secret from everyone in the house. You really don't want to call "MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY OUR PLANE IS GOINNG DOWN!" while someone is sharing your router and downloading a full movie) 🤣 with 2400 Mbps you might be able to get a better VR experience. I hope this info could help some people. Good infomation video @Stereo3DProductions p.s. sorry my bad English skill T_T
See 4:10 I would very likely benefit of an upgrade since i could then exceed 250Mbps with wireless VR (you cannot run wireless VR at the peak bitrate of the router, though, but it still raises your limit when you upgrade)
Thanks for the kind words! On HDMI link: It's a really, really useless feature! You can't play VR games with that thing and it apparently barely supports 1080p60. I have really no use case to test on something that low-spec.
@Stereo3DProductions I did some research, and you are right. It's not where it's at for avid gamers, we like high resolution and high refresh rate. Only use I can really see is if you pair it with an ROG Ally X that outputs 1080p or maybe some productivity.
That is a REALLY good question and I don't have a direct answer: I ran Borderlands 2 VR by launching it directly from the Games tab in VD. This bypassed both SteamVR and Oculus. It *seemed* to be detecting Oculus games, but I could be wrong and BL2VR might just have run through OpenXR (which VD can do and bypass SteamVR or Oculus completely using VDXR) however... I'm almost sure it substituted Oculus, because I don't recall BL2VR even having OpenXR... but I do recall it having Oculus runtimes natively. That's all I got for now, sorry!
Hi mate, Did you know that Virtual Desktop was the first wireless VR solution for Quest and was available within a month of the Quest 1 being released? (only asking because your video seems to imply that Air Link is the original baseline solution for wireless VR) It was developed by a single developer (ggodin) and initially Oculus tried to shut the feature down because they thought it initially delivered an experience that made the headset look poor (or maybe that it was competition for the recently released Oculus Rift S). I am convinced that Air Link only exists because of the enthusiastic reception for Virtual Desktop's wireless VR and the amazing progress from a technical curiosity in June 2019 to a credible alternative to wired VR by January 2020. If you didn't live those 6 months as a Quest 1 owner it's difficult to explain the giddy excitement of the near daily updates to Virtual Desktop delivering something that seemed nothing short of alchemy. Don't get me wrong, although I am a self confessed Virtual Desktop fanboy, I am also a big fan of Air Link - if only because it is the only option that can play the Oculus exclusive 'From Other Suns'.
I one hundred percent know this, and yeah I wish I had mentioned it... Virtual Desktop literally forced Oculus to make their own wireless tech instead of producing high quality excuses not to! In fact I incorrectly thought VD was also the original wired solution and that Oculus had locked out the API, but after checking, that isn't correct. I only speak of Airlink as a baseline in regards to myself, with it just being the first I tried, and so the one I know best out of all three.
VD copied AMVR (among a few other niche options); VD was not the first PCVR wireless streamer. Additionally, VD was only made into a usable consumer product by copying Oculus' Sliced Encoding feature which they made for the original wired Link (AADT; this reduced VD's latency considerably). Lastly, back in the initial days of the Quest store, it was heavily curated and didn't allow any 'beta' features for any apps. VD was originally accepted onto the store as a flatscreen remote desktop app. But Goddin 'added' an alpha feature of 'PCVR streaming'; which was far from usable. Of course, this got it flagged in the store curation and temporarily suspended. I'm pretty confident that Goddin did this on purpose to get the community mad at Facebook (a somewhat similar scenario Epic did with the Apple store). So here you go, actual context to the whole story.
@@meowmix705 oh yes, I had forgotten about AMVR 🙂 I do remember the other events you mention, but I don’t have your insight on the motives. I actually bought VD to try the experimental VR (with very low expectations) about 24 hours before it was pulled by Meta. It seems that ggodin is a bit of a polarising character in the VR community, but I do not follow social media closely enough to understand/care why. As you can probably tell from my original reply, I am a fan of his work, but not to the exclusion of all other available options.
One advantage of VD is bypassing the oculus runtime and get some extra performance. One thing that should be mentioned for low end users. Wife plays VRC on a laptop 3050 with 4gb and it performs better on VD than even cable link.
Yep, I am not surprised. But go figure Steam Link should be the same thing: Complete runtime bypass, yet in that case it's a dumpster fire onboard a train wreck. I am truly thankful for the existence of VD. When I first tried RE7 on Godlike I kept shouting to myself "I've been robbed all these years!"
@@Stereo3DProductions oh man, I also have a 4080, got both a Q3 and a PSVR2 and let me tell ya, FO4VR on Godlike is insane even though the VR2's screen is supposedly higher res the Q3 blows it out of the water in plain clarity and sharpness
Steam Link truly shines on Quest Pro. The foveated encoding is tied to eye tracking so you can drop the outer ring encoding to absolute potato levels and not notice it at all. But on my Q3, I’d use VD and even AirLink before ever considering Steam Link. Haven’t finished watching yet so apologies if this was covered but the Pro is kinda niche. And arguably the superior PCVR headset over the Q3, but I digress.
I used the Pro at work and I absolutely hated it. The controllers are extremely unreliable, I hope they got that sorted because it was borderline unusable. Sadly I never got a chance to enjoy the upsides of eye tracking; kind of a bummer.
Off topic, but I find it funny that the music from Metroid Prime is in more videos about other games than the number of episodes you made playing the game.
One thing you should also mention if you ever do another video on this topic, is the forced foveated encoding in Steam Link. It really hinders the picture quality, especially when you lower the pixel width. Valve really needs to make that optional. That's actually what the 1536px settings adjusts. And the higher you raise the resolution to improve visuals, the more it shrinks the eye box of the foveated encoding. So you end up with a circle of clarity in the middle and the edges blurry. Really hinders the Quest 3's edge to edge clarity.
Yep, a few other commenters brought up this: Well, two things... first off Steam Link decided to be special and make encoder resolution mean something it doesn't mean and secondly, not only is this not optional, but we cannot adjust actual encoder resolution and it's certainly encoding at a total resolution that's too low for the Quests 2 and 3. I wish we could adjust the actual encoder resolution, and that foveated focus size was a percentage value, with an option to disable it. I'll actually revisit Steam Link on my second channel soon. I'll use the resolution setting properly to see if it at least makes it run smoother (on 1536 it runs like garbage, choppy, latent, the worst VR driver of them all). I can't save it's terrible encoder or low resolution width, but we can sure try to get rid of the encoder slideshowing.
Thanks for the comparison. Why did you skip the option to set the openXR runtime on virtual desktop? For me it looks like you used the steam openxr runtime.
Well, right now there is no solution to record the full VR output over VDXR. I can capture pancake/2D with the OpenXR OBS plugin but that's not what I want. I am forced to use SteamVR just to record videos in a standard format. The bummer here is that this kind of shyed me away from detailing this option. Indeed if you're just wanting to play with no recording, VDXR is the way to go. SteamVR is like a tax.
Render resolution, indeed, I hang around 1.15 to 1.25! With encoder resolution there's a couple of tradeoffs, yes theoretically it helps to have it at 1.1 but, it enlarges the video stream which dillutes the bitrate, and thus affects quality. It's a delicate balancing act.
@@Stereo3DProductions For Quest 2 and Quest 3s, 4200x2100 total is native resolution after barrel correction and for Quest 3 its about 5000x2500. Encoder resolution should be the actual panel size yeah. Great video over all!
Only issue with 5000x2500 is that will defecate rusty nails on even mid end systems, which is why I put emphasis on 1.0 in this video. Yes, we want to maximize res, but we don't want players hitting 3 frames per second 🤭 so I try to go for a balanced starting point.
@@Stereo3DProductions You sure you read that correctly? 5000x2500 is the combined resolution, meaning 2500x2500 per eye ish. That's the real 1.0x imo (For Quest 3). I can't stand that that steamvr and quest software change the scaling with refresh rate. Impossible to help people with problems when they just say "I run 1.2 resolution". Like that could mean ANYTHING especially when Quest Link / Virtual Desktop get stacked with steamvr scaling
Can you pleasee make a maxed out settings video for quest wired? For high end and low PCs.. most people I believe are still using wired, esp flight simulator and sim racers and this video is great!! 👍 ❤
Just take my wireless Airlink setup from here but jack the bitrate to 500Mbps! Should look nice and crisp, especially with sliced encoding enabled. I too still use the wire for iRacing since I need the least latency possible.
From two other channels ranking them it seems like air link is actually the worst unless you are in the same room as the router. Also I'm using a laptop Rtx2060 so I'm guessing treat it like the lower end setups?
Yep, the 2060 will run very similarly to my good ol GTX 1080... also I actually forgot to include one of my tests in this video: I thought I was softballing Airlink by having the router literally 6-12 feet away from me, so I did a session one floor under my router (still not too far away, but albeit with a slid structure in the way) and Airlink held the fort at 200Mbps which actually surprised me. I think a key factor is to have absolutely no interference, both on the wired and wifi network.
I switched router to Xiaomi AX6000 (not Redmi) and got 10G ethernet adapter (searched for 2.5G but got 10G really cheap) and now run Air Link at ERW thrown to 5000 (actually, stream resolution is capped internally to 4096x2240, so in your case it's the same too) with (!!!!) 960 Mbps (don't forget to set codec to H.264 and enable Sliced Encoding so it matches the cable settings). Really crazy. I run games at 4096x2208 at 120 Hz with RTX 2080 Ti (and i9-9980HK at 4.5 GHz) and just drop refresh rate for more demanding games. What's surprising - Beat Saber is playable at Expert+ on these settings (also playable with turning resolution to the max) as it still manages to sync the total latency into under 3 vsync intervals at 120 Hz, same as it uses at 10 Mbps. Also, the color accuracy here is THE BEST of all three software, perhaps due to they actually fully know what profiles are used or smth. btw I also use VD (vrchat for example), and with some info I've heard from your vid, will try to fine-tune it again for some of my games. Also some more info about Steam Link encoding resolution - it's set as FFR diameter for encoding of 2064x2208 image (look at the image at very low settings, you'll notice the center has same sharpness as at max, but the far edges will be yeeted), and is determined by Encode Resolution setting multiplied by SS. This zone reaches screen borders at 175% SS and starts shrinking at more. So it actually uses same "encoding ppd" at center of the image at any setting.
Something I need to note about SL: I've been messing with it a bit since I found out that they decided Encoder Resolution Width doesn't mean what it is supposed to mean and made it be something completely different... After many tests I HIGHLY doubt the stream is 2064x2208 per eye. It looks like 1800x2000ish at best. There's some upscaling and there's just no way to make it not ugly. The only saving grace is lowering Encoder Resolution Width doesn't change the encoder resolution width (The setting should be called Foveated Encoding Width) and makes it run a lot better. If I had known this before making the video, I think SL would land a ~60% score rather than that rock bottom 53. Better, but it still sucks. I'll soon make a new SL video on the second channel, where I'll try to determine once and for all what that awful resolution width is.
@@Stereo3DProductions I mean it's not using 2064x2208, but something like it takes a center area of that. As "encoding ppd/clarity/sharpness" doesn't change with settings. Also edited the initial comment a bit, so if you switch router for a better one, go try 960 mbits over Air Link, that's HOLY SHIT the whole other level
I pray one day we’ll be able to use virtual desktop with the link cable. Also I’m not sure if this works, but my pc has a wifi 6e antenna on it. Theoretically, if I were to connect my headset to the pc hotspot, would that be better than through the house wifi.
Yep, it would look like DisplayPort if Meta let VD use the USB API. I wonder if that would work... wouldn't hurt to try tbh. You could maybe turn the adapter into an access point that can also see the PC itself on its network.
I use the hotspot on my PC and it's a great option instead of the second wifi router! For the first time you might have some issues with the connection. I had spikes for no reason and my speed was low. To solve it follow these steps that work for me: 1. Your PC should be wired. 2. Connect your mobile phone before your headset. 3. In my case I recreate a new hotspot name. After that I haven't any issues and now just connect the headset. So now I have about 10ms latency at ~110mbps
I used Virtual desktop for a long time with 3 diferent headsets, recently started using Steam Link to try the hand tracking and my experience has been mostly good. More reliable as with Virtual Desktop I often see compression artifacts and even lagspikes which I do not notice with SteamLink on a high-end setup. About fidelity, the thing is that overall with VR, if you don't have one of those expensive enterprise high res headsets you will always notice the low PPI. And without an enthusiast-professional tier graphics card (80-90 series gpu)you will always see frame drops in some games. I just got used to the lack of visual fidelity since it doesn't differ much per program as long as you have a good connection. Maybe Airlink is the worst in my experience. Also small comment on the video, you talked about the 70 series gpu being mid-end but the reality is that with a 3070-4070 you get well over 90fps at 2k high graphics in almost any game, that is not mid-end even by today's standards, that is high-end. As much as the labling has changed the 90 series is just a professional grade GPU like the Titan series was, Nvidia just replaced the label and nothing else. And most people still buy 60 series, if you don't beleive me just look at the steam hardware survey. That is the mid-end.
When I say mid-end I mean more in the context of having a Quest 3 (4128x2208 base resolution, 2K PER eye) and stacking on resolution factors well above 1.0 you're going to easily hit a lot of walls with even a 4070. Yes, a 70 will definitely get you bang for the buck even on a Quest 3, albeit with softballed settings. In general for pancake mode a 4070 can be considered high end.
@@Stereo3DProductions I mean sure you could classify them by usage but the cards themselves have tiers that have been generally accepted. I understand your point tho, and it isn't that big of a deal. And I guess by "pankake mode" you mean flatscreen, if yes then yeah 70 series are generally accepted as high-end cards.
"pancake", "lifeless", "flat"... yeah I mean monitors 🤭 Point being with a Quest 3 in VR, the 4070 will perform at the middle range of available hardware. There's no way around it. I am trying to line up people's expectations so they don't think they can run 8K 120Hz on a 4060. Having had this channel for a decade now I have seen things, so I cover.
I have a quest 3 and I use steam link because for whatever reason air link does not work, ive tried everything. It always lags so badly it leaves weird trail wherever i look and i have a 3070 oc and 600mbs 6e internet with the router in the same room. Ive tried every youtube toturial and got it to sorta work but still laggy
The trail is ASW freaking out because there is way too much latency. That is genuinely strange. Just to be sure, your PC is hooked up to the router by wire, yes?
@@Stereo3DProductions by Ethernet yeah, Its strange Ive even tried reinstalling it the meta quest program. Maybe I should get a AP and upgrade my internet speed. Definitely will buy virtual desktop soon.
I totally agree about the fact that VD is better picture quality than steam link / air link, but with my 4080 super, I have issues with 120hz mode in VD and I don’t have any with steam link with same resolution. And steam link latency is WAAAAAY better ! A game like Arcade Paradise VR or Beat saber, I have issues with VD but none with Steam link. And I honestly don’t know why, because few month ago steam link was so bad ! And now it’s feels very different. 90hz is great, but when you touch the feeling of 120hz, hard to come back to 90 😂 I still don’t know wich one of those pcvr app I’ll use mainly. Looks like VD / Steamlink / air link are working very differently on each pc 😂
Steam Link on low foveated encoding width will in fact outclock all the other runtimes mainly because the stream's resolution is the lowest by far and cannot be adjusted at all; yeah if you're softballing the most important part, it'll run like lightning but also look a mess compared to anything else. From my tests I have not noticed a PC-to-PC difference: the differences very likely come down to network conditions and *maybe* the difference between AMD and nVidia GPU's, although I doubt that. They work almost the same from system to system.
I wonder how Steam VR while using OVR is compared to the others. Does OVR make it any better or is steam vr just shit if you have a quest 3 regardless? Great video! :)
My best answer to this is by writing a short SteamVR update log: Update 1 Fixed 3 issues Update 2 Created 3 new issues by implementing features that people *totally* wanted Update 3 Fixed 3 issues we created, but created 3 more new issues in the process, along with two other new issues for another *really, totally* useful feature It's basically how it's been going in a nutshell LOL (I even recall SteamVR managing to be shit with the Index sometimes)
@@Stereo3DProductions , Yeah I couldn't afford to get into VR until the Rift S came along. Guess I'll be using the oculus one for now then. Don't wanna buy the Virtual Desktop as I don't VR a LOT, but I do play in vr fairly regularly. Thanks for the update, Cheers!
@@Stereo3DProductions , I have not really used any of the wireless options. I have a quest 3 nowadays that my grandmother bought me as a gift, and because I had a Rift S before that with no on board compute, I have just been using a cabled link connection up to this point. I am considering moving the ISP router into my bedroom to try some of the wireless stuff, which is why I came across your video. Needed to know if my shitty router was even capable, cuz if not it wouldn't be happening. I haven't gotten any further than that. Doesn't using Steam Link though lock you into using the steam codec and limiting my potential bandwidth? Did I misunderstand? I do not want to move over to wireless if it's going to be a lower fidelity feed than my wired connection, but I heard the wireless stuff on Ques 3 was pretty good, so just doing research for the moment. Thanks for the extra info though, I appreciate you taking the time.
Already done and described in the video VD gets beat if you jack the Link resolution to 1.3 and run at a bitrate of 500+ with an appropriate encoder resolution width. What kills me is anything below that spec and VD beats wired Link plain and simple. Very impressive.
Yes, but 4096 is definitely not the default value, so at least you're forcing it to the max. If ever they do change that silly limit (less than 1% lol) then having the habit of putting in 4128 will do it.
Tell me you didn't watch the whole video without telling me you didn't watch the whole video 😂😂😂😂😂 It's breakaway glass! It's so much fun it's a crime that it is so expensive!
Bro can you please do comparison between Virtual Desktop and Standable for Full Body Estimation (FBE tracking), i just got quest pro as it has eye tracking but it does not work natively in vr chat so i am searching how i can enable face tracking and body estimation tracking first option is wired connection via cable link(currently searching how to do this before buying a link cable) second option is using Virtual Desktop / standable to achieve Full Body Estimation and even if i use second option of going wireless i am not sure which internet pakage to get as currently i have 50mbps which i know is low as the image gets too blurry and laggy
I don't know what Standable is but keep in mind bitrate for wireless VR has *nothing do do with your internet bitrate*. The signal for wireless VR never leaves your home, nor does the wireless VR driver get anything from outside your home. The speed limit you have is dictated by your router and may well be at a MINIMUM of 800Mbps if not triple that.
@@Stereo3DProductionsthanks for replying bro, i am planning to get a new router and increasing my pakage speed to 300mps so i can try virtual desktop to try out full body estimation wirelessly right now i wanna spend as less money as possible since i just bought quest pro, i want to find out if i can do full body tracking via cable link (will have to buy cable link for this)
@@roccoeditor You don't need internet speed this is between your PC and your Headset. Make sure your pc is Wired into the router and router having WiFI6 is super helpful.
Hi, gt video, can you advise, I have cpu ryzen 9 5900 and gpu rtx 4070,, I have a quest 3, I've tried virtual desktop, steam vr, airline, I just cannot get the vr to run smooth, I get latency, stuttering, black screens when I return my head with the quest on,, I never had this problem before when I had rtx 3060 and ryzen 7 300, sometimes the first few minutes the games seem OK, then fall apart, I do not have wifi 6, and I'm getting 320mbps speed, any ideas, best regards
The lower you set your resolution, the more link sharpening becomes useful. However above 1.0x there's no point as it will induce shimmer rather than improve anything.
Oh yeahhhh... if you meant SteamVR... it's a struggle. Not only do we run two runtimes, but SteamVR is so often scuffed. One minute it's doing great, then an update comes in and destroys the entire planet lol
Airlink is honestly honorable... you likely shouldn't need anything better UNLESS you find yourself looking at actual issues and being bothered by them... as long as you avoid Steam Link, you are good, as SL is far, far behind in everything.
@@Stereo3DProductions I actually don't see it being far behind, if at all. Just tried comparing stutters vs quality vs latency on my setup and steam link is kinda good in this, airlink was second and vd just can't give me a middle ground between medium and high on quality, as well as it strangely lags with 200 mbps bitrate, I find it could not automatically adjust bitrate to my network conditions, which is also strange, quality looks good tho Overall it feels like steam link is easiest, plug and play experience, I could leave everything on defaults and get a decent experience. With airlink I struggle with that stupid old oculus dashboard interface, and lack of user facing settings - going into debug tool every time is bruh VD has most settings but its runtime seems to be not the best currently (compared to steamvr and meta openxr), some settings are outright useless to me, like ssw, upscaling but that's just my config, VR gaming always felt harder to setup compared to flatscreen
Steam Link is objectively a piece of trash, though. It is not even close, not even to Airlink. Please avoid it as you are squandering whatever extra resolution and game render you are trying to go for. The encoder resolution width is so low on Steam Link, the max it will send to your headset is 3072x1642... the Quest 3's native res is 4128x2208. That is a crime and those who made Steam Link should be fired. You can set your render resolution to 6000x3000 it will STILL send a crappy 3072x1642 stream (maximum, mind you, if you are using the slider and don't force max the encoder resolution width, you are actually getting 2688x1436 resolution OR LOWER sent to your headset.) Please for the love of god do not legitimize that piece of trash. PS: The Airlink dev tool might be BRUH but at least that runtime allows us to run at 2024 resolutions by taking two minutes to change three values.
VD is by far the best runtime and wireless interface by the way. Again, objectively, with multiple experiements performed. Cut in stone. You need to watch the entire Steam Link segment along with the rating segment of this video. VD gets 90%, Airlink 76% and Steam Link 53%.
@@Stereo3DProductions That was simply my experience, I judged by what I saw in the headset, its not trash I believe SL "encoded video size" is not what you think it is. For me it changes the size of area that is in focus, not blurred. This has to do with variable rate supersampling, where you give quality only to the part of the image where you look So it is not the same setting as in oculus debug tool And of course for quest 2/3 it would be just big constant area in front, only on quest pro it would work with eye tracking Also trying to override the setting in config to the value that the UI does not let you... tells you that you probably should not do that, Valve on their support page recommends max 1280
Let's be real it's actually still just Facebook in the guise of some random name they made up. Like they're wearing cheap plastic glasses with fake moustache going "I don't know who this Facebook guy is, I am Meta". I do not mind perpetually butchering this name.
Fair enough lol. I still call any quest headset an Oculus quest. To be fair to them though it isn’t really facebook anymore. At this point it would be like Google being called Gmail or something. They certainly kept the questionable business practices though
debug tool (oculus folder) (sevices) pixel override 1.6 spacewarp off (link) v codec h265 encode res 2944 link sharpen quality dimming enabled (router settings) for using router as dedicated vr set to ap mode system/mode/ disable twt, smart connect and 2.4ghz mode
change channel width to 80mhz set channel to on that is not in use will depend on your devices i.e mines 40 change broadcast mode to ax only now find beacon interval set that as low as it can go mines at 40 then rts,dtim,groupkey same thing as low as it can go wmm should be on ap isolation off airtime fairness off also reserve ips for both the headset and pc (check there on device mac on the network beforehand)i.e wifi settings privacy use device mac restart
this is how i got mine working properly 1.1ms/11.1ms on steam 6-14 ms to display
It depends on what codec you select... while I prefer H265 10-bit I do have to tweak the gamma to avoid it being too bright: I use a value of 0.85 to make it look similar to the other codecs. If this brightnessbothers you, try using AV1 10-bit instead. It's a very good efficient codec that is a lot less bright. As you'll see on my side by side comparisons, though, VD is not more or less bright or washed out than the others in any significant way. I surmise the two H264 codecs are actually darker if anything.
@ Thank you for your reply. I played the Arizona sunshine remake on stream link and VD. The game looked so much better on steam link for me. Colours were great and resolution was really high. VD in comparison looked very washed out and pixelated.
Resolution is objectively lower on Steam Link (unless you compare to VD on potato or low) as Steam Link uses a fixed stream resolution that is definitely lower than the Quest 3's native resolution. (Although it may look fine on Quest 2 or 3S because i think the Steam Link stream resolution is slightly larger than Q2's native res)
@ I was playing games like re7 praydog mod, into the radius 2, lone echo, and metro awakening yesterday. VD does look sharp and performance is very good. However, no matter what codec I try it always looks compressed more on VD to me. Definitely the foveated rendering is more aggressive on steam link, and it’s not noticeable on VD. I can run a game like HLA on VD on godlike. Zero compression and performance is buttery smooth.
There is a situation here that most people misunderstand, and since Steam hasn't clearly specified it, it creates confusion. The 'encode video size (px)' actually functions as FOV rendering In other words, it determines how much of (px) the screen will be displayed in high resolution You can lower this value gradually and observe the center and edges of the image to see for yourself In my opinion, this shows how unsuccessful Steam is at explaining how it manages these settings. Despite searching a lot in text files, I still haven't found a method to precisely adjust the encoding resolution From what I understand, they prefer to leave these settings within SteamVR So, while these are connected but separate, you need to find a balance that suits you from the menu.
Yep from the comments here I gathered that much. Steam Link decided to be special and misname Foveated Encoding Width. However I did further testing after making this video and I can now say while lowering Foveated Encoding Width it RUNS a lot better, but the problem is it always looks like crap. I highly suspect the real stream resolution is around 80% the Quest 3 resolution and we can't change it, hence why it's just always inferior, but also runs better for those who have issues with stutter. If you softball the stream dimensions of course it'll stutter less. As I said to another commenter, this would actually raise my Steam Link overall score in the 60's as opposed to low 50's. A big gain, but still last in the line.
Thank God you showed up on my algorithm, thanks for this comparison vid
Thank you for this, lately its been hard finding good wireless PCVR settings information all in one place.
This video is incredibly well done thanks for all the info :)
This video is very informative. Much appreciated. I have 900 up and down and it's pretty smooth.
Banger 🙌
h Waffl3
Virtual Desktop is the best, very reliable.
Something to be mentioned is that It also has Chroma Key Passthrough and Snapdragon Game Super Resolution for lower-end specs
I presume SGSR is similar to FSR but executed on the Quest's side?
@@Stereo3DProductions Yes it does!
No shit, I'll have to look into that. I have a 12700H with an RTX 3060 mobile. Think I'll see any improvement?
Definitely if it's anything like FSR!
VD can also play videos and photos from any given directory on your PC, which would need a separate app when connecting via air play or steam link
Thanks man. Just got my quest 3. This sure did help me out. Great info
Excellent video with awesome presentation. I'm going to subscribe because you sincerely deserve it. THIS IS HOW TO KEEP PEOPLE ENGAGED WITH CONTENT GUYS !
Great informative video. Best one on this subject- switching to virtual desktop!
Thanks! Do report back with your experience! 😎
For me VD all the way. I bought it back in the day for my Oculus Go, just to be able to connect to my PC. It worked well. Later I bought it again for my first Quest, but the Quest2 and 3 could use that version again. And I would never have bought a Pico4, if it wouldn't have had Virtual Desktop. Now I upgraded to the Pico4 Ultra and my VD works on that as well with no problems.
Tried airlink and Steam link and nearly every time I have to connect to my PC via VD in order to make Steam Link running.
Of all programs VD delivers like you said.
How are you enjoying the Pico 4 Ultra btw? I came VERY close to getting one!
PS: An Oculus Go owner, an OG I see ;)
@@Stereo3DProductions I like it a lot. It's much lighter to wear compared to the Quest 3. And if you're into 3D like I am, it's also a great 3D camera. Last week, I took it on a trip and captured some photos at a temple. The pictures are side-by-side (SBS) and nice and sharp. The videos are spatial, but I haven't found a program yet to convert them into 3D SBS format. That was one of my main reasons for getting it, as a 3D camera costs nearly the same.
Whoa I did not know about those 3D capabilities. Interesting, I am taking note.,
@@Stereo3DProductionsYes, you should. I went on a bicycle trip this week to a nearby dam. I brought the Ultra again with me and before I started cycling over the dam, I went into the shadow of some trees and put my headset on. Took pictures an videos while crossing the dam. It works better than with a regular camera. Gonna bring it today again on my bicycle trip and will record parts of it.
thanx rot this comparision, I learned a lot
Thanks for another geat video, haven't seen one in a while.
I post a lot on my second channel, but it's a lot more off-the-cuff and unscripted... I'm gonna try to ramp up production on this channel over the fall!
Someone hire this man to make an air link tutorial.
The VirtualDesktop I run at all maxed settings, sharpness and the snapdragon sharpener. In steam, I run it at 70% supersampling to offset the hardware power from pc to headset to simply focus on making the Image as beautiful as possible. 72fps, and godlike as well.
the Algo GODS have blessed me!
now thats how you open a video 🕺🕺🕺
THANKS 15 ENJOY STAY!
Just in case people need some tips, double pressing the left system button while in Virtual Desktop quickly switches you to Desktop mode from VR and to VR mode from Desktop. I use that alot when needing a higher quality desktop window.
amazing video, just looked for this
If you searched for wireless VR comparisons and found this, that makes me really happy... that was the exact intention... hell yeah!
@@Stereo3DProductions yes, exactly :)
I'm saving this video for my friends, good job
Thank you so much! Hope your friends enjoy as well!
If you're interested on some extra testing, here are some things I've found
Steam link has the Best latency, meaning it's really good for beat saber or ragnarock, but the frame drops only really disappear at 80 bitrate which isn't good, I also had the quality increase at 200% render res, but you must restart the game for it to apply (steam doesn't tell you)
Even with this, both oculus and virtual desktop still look miles better even if left at default settings
An additional note is that quest pro has eye tracked decoding on steam link, meaning you can set the encode res to be at its lowest and you shouldn't see a difference as it's only putting effort on decoding where you're looking at, even then idk what happens with steam link that it looks really bad
Now as for oculus, if you still have your 1060, you may see that Oculus link is unusable if you use steamVR, I don't know why but having both oculus and steam takes away about 30% of your performance, and only really affects old cards, as an addition, recording or streaming on OBS while using Oculus at 120fps is basically impossible on anything that's not a 4070ti or higher, oculus loves to take tons of encoder resource and only cards with 2 encode Chips (4070ti +) can handle the quest stream + obs at the same time
Finally I don't have anything to say about virtual desktop, it's just very consistent with such an abundant amount of system setups, it's really good
Steam Link is so frustrating in the end. If you softball the encoder resolution width it actually performs super decently. If they put another round of crunch time on it I can't help but think they would manage to improve the encoder resolution width issue and get us twice the pixels with the same smooth performance. Keep in mind that rendering at 200% with Steam Link is mostly pointless given the encoder res width is so low it downscales your render, which in turn gets upscaled in the headset.
Also I had a GTX 1080, never had a 1060.
For encoder limitations, the best way to record video on OBS is to enable IntelHD on your system and use QuickSync in OBS to record. This frees up both your CPU and your GPU's dedicated encoder for wireless VR, while the dedicated encoder on IntelHD handles the video recording. I have had to do this myself because I am trying to shift over to higher res captures.
Oh btw I'm also annoyed that Steam Link actually uses the eye tracking for encoding, because from the on board recordings I have it's not even doing static sliced encoding on Quest 3. VD and Airlink both do. (Oh that happens to be because of the 1536 ERW, because of course Steam Link is special and reinvents what ERW means)
19:23 Just wondering why when you connect to WiFi 5g you can only get 866 mbps because normally only Quest 3 can receive WiFi 5g at 2,400 mbps. What model router are you using?
I'm using TP-Link AX3000 for 5GHz 2402 Mbps and 2.4 GHz 574 Mbps (2.4GHz turned off) and it runs 2400 Mbps on my Quest 3 with VD all the time.
For other people who has the highend hardwares but still having a bad performance. Check If your router has the following specifications.
- WiFi 5/6/6E/7
- 802.11ac/ax
- Minimum 2402 Mbps on Wireless 5.0 GHz * this is what you need for the Quest 3* (Quest 2 Max at ~1200 Mbps)
- Connect this router ** directly to PC with a LAN cable ** (Check the LAN connection speed on the Ethernet Status window. It should be 1.0 Gbps or above)
- Connect the Quest 2/3 on WiFi 5GHz and Turn off 2.4 GHz
- Use this router for your Quest 3 only (Keep the password a secret from everyone in the house. You really don't want to call "MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY OUR PLANE IS GOINNG DOWN!" while someone is sharing your router and downloading a full movie) 🤣
with 2400 Mbps you might be able to get a better VR experience.
I hope this info could help some people.
Good infomation video @Stereo3DProductions
p.s. sorry my bad English skill T_T
See 4:10
I would very likely benefit of an upgrade since i could then exceed 250Mbps with wireless VR (you cannot run wireless VR at the peak bitrate of the router, though, but it still raises your limit when you upgrade)
i use a ax1800 and it works fine same set up tho dedicated for vr
What a video! Lots of respect for the time and research you put in.
Please, please, please do a video of HDMI link on the quest 3
Thanks for the kind words! On HDMI link: It's a really, really useless feature! You can't play VR games with that thing and it apparently barely supports 1080p60. I have really no use case to test on something that low-spec.
@Stereo3DProductions I did some research, and you are right. It's not where it's at for avid gamers, we like high resolution and high refresh rate. Only use I can really see is if you pair it with an ROG Ally X that outputs 1080p or maybe some productivity.
very detailed video, thanks a lot
Thanks! Go figure I missed two things in those setups despite all the planning, but all in all I covered as much as I could
Excellent vid, thanks
Great video! If you use virtual desktop are you able to play your oculus PC games or just your steam library?
That is a REALLY good question and I don't have a direct answer: I ran Borderlands 2 VR by launching it directly from the Games tab in VD. This bypassed both SteamVR and Oculus. It *seemed* to be detecting Oculus games, but I could be wrong and BL2VR might just have run through OpenXR (which VD can do and bypass SteamVR or Oculus completely using VDXR) however... I'm almost sure it substituted Oculus, because I don't recall BL2VR even having OpenXR... but I do recall it having Oculus runtimes natively. That's all I got for now, sorry!
@@Stereo3DProductions I went ahead and pulled the trigger on Virtual Desktop and can confirm that you can access your Oculus library with it!
Me "totally" not realising due to this vid that I just upgraded from a quest 2 to 3 because of steam link resolution issues 😂
Hi mate,
Did you know that Virtual Desktop was the first wireless VR solution for Quest and was available within a month of the Quest 1 being released? (only asking because your video seems to imply that Air Link is the original baseline solution for wireless VR)
It was developed by a single developer (ggodin) and initially Oculus tried to shut the feature down because they thought it initially delivered an experience that made the headset look poor (or maybe that it was competition for the recently released Oculus Rift S).
I am convinced that Air Link only exists because of the enthusiastic reception for Virtual Desktop's wireless VR and the amazing progress from a technical curiosity in June 2019 to a credible alternative to wired VR by January 2020.
If you didn't live those 6 months as a Quest 1 owner it's difficult to explain the giddy excitement of the near daily updates to Virtual Desktop delivering something that seemed nothing short of alchemy.
Don't get me wrong, although I am a self confessed Virtual Desktop fanboy, I am also a big fan of Air Link - if only because it is the only option that can play the Oculus exclusive 'From Other Suns'.
I one hundred percent know this, and yeah I wish I had mentioned it... Virtual Desktop literally forced Oculus to make their own wireless tech instead of producing high quality excuses not to! In fact I incorrectly thought VD was also the original wired solution and that Oculus had locked out the API, but after checking, that isn't correct.
I only speak of Airlink as a baseline in regards to myself, with it just being the first I tried, and so the one I know best out of all three.
VD copied AMVR (among a few other niche options); VD was not the first PCVR wireless streamer. Additionally, VD was only made into a usable consumer product by copying Oculus' Sliced Encoding feature which they made for the original wired Link (AADT; this reduced VD's latency considerably). Lastly, back in the initial days of the Quest store, it was heavily curated and didn't allow any 'beta' features for any apps. VD was originally accepted onto the store as a flatscreen remote desktop app. But Goddin 'added' an alpha feature of 'PCVR streaming'; which was far from usable. Of course, this got it flagged in the store curation and temporarily suspended. I'm pretty confident that Goddin did this on purpose to get the community mad at Facebook (a somewhat similar scenario Epic did with the Apple store).
So here you go, actual context to the whole story.
@@meowmix705 oh yes, I had forgotten about AMVR 🙂
I do remember the other events you mention, but I don’t have your insight on the motives. I actually bought VD to try the experimental VR (with very low expectations) about 24 hours before it was pulled by Meta.
It seems that ggodin is a bit of a polarising character in the VR community, but I do not follow social media closely enough to understand/care why.
As you can probably tell from my original reply, I am a fan of his work, but not to the exclusion of all other available options.
Nice intro, couldn't tell if it was real or not.
That was more fun that it should have been lol
One advantage of VD is bypassing the oculus runtime and get some extra performance. One thing that should be mentioned for low end users. Wife plays VRC on a laptop 3050 with 4gb and it performs better on VD than even cable link.
Yep, I am not surprised.
But go figure Steam Link should be the same thing: Complete runtime bypass, yet in that case it's a dumpster fire onboard a train wreck. I am truly thankful for the existence of VD. When I first tried RE7 on Godlike I kept shouting to myself "I've been robbed all these years!"
@@Stereo3DProductions oh man, I also have a 4080, got both a Q3 and a PSVR2 and let me tell ya, FO4VR on Godlike is insane even though the VR2's screen is supposedly higher res the Q3 blows it out of the water in plain clarity and sharpness
You remind me now, I need to try FO4 on Godlike, I've only cranked it to Ultra and it has room to spare. Hmmmmmm :)
Steam Link truly shines on Quest Pro. The foveated encoding is tied to eye tracking so you can drop the outer ring encoding to absolute potato levels and not notice it at all. But on my Q3, I’d use VD and even AirLink before ever considering Steam Link.
Haven’t finished watching yet so apologies if this was covered but the Pro is kinda niche. And arguably the superior PCVR headset over the Q3, but I digress.
I used the Pro at work and I absolutely hated it. The controllers are extremely unreliable, I hope they got that sorted because it was borderline unusable. Sadly I never got a chance to enjoy the upsides of eye tracking; kind of a bummer.
Off topic, but I find it funny that the music from Metroid Prime is in more videos about other games than the number of episodes you made playing the game.
Downloaded the whole OST when I recorded part 1 of that series, it's great!
One thing you should also mention if you ever do another video on this topic, is the forced foveated encoding in Steam Link. It really hinders the picture quality, especially when you lower the pixel width. Valve really needs to make that optional. That's actually what the 1536px settings adjusts. And the higher you raise the resolution to improve visuals, the more it shrinks the eye box of the foveated encoding. So you end up with a circle of clarity in the middle and the edges blurry. Really hinders the Quest 3's edge to edge clarity.
Yep, a few other commenters brought up this: Well, two things... first off Steam Link decided to be special and make encoder resolution mean something it doesn't mean and secondly, not only is this not optional, but we cannot adjust actual encoder resolution and it's certainly encoding at a total resolution that's too low for the Quests 2 and 3.
I wish we could adjust the actual encoder resolution, and that foveated focus size was a percentage value, with an option to disable it.
I'll actually revisit Steam Link on my second channel soon. I'll use the resolution setting properly to see if it at least makes it run smoother (on 1536 it runs like garbage, choppy, latent, the worst VR driver of them all). I can't save it's terrible encoder or low resolution width, but we can sure try to get rid of the encoder slideshowing.
Excellent! Thank you! After this I was able to play wireless VR again! Just a quick question... do you happen to have CCD? Thanks again!
CCD? I guess i don't if I don't know what it is (The only CCD i know is Charge Coupled Device lol)
PS: Just in case... CC Deeeez...
Thanks for the comparison. Why did you skip the option to set the openXR runtime on virtual desktop? For me it looks like you used the steam openxr runtime.
Well, right now there is no solution to record the full VR output over VDXR. I can capture pancake/2D with the OpenXR OBS plugin but that's not what I want. I am forced to use SteamVR just to record videos in a standard format. The bummer here is that this kind of shyed me away from detailing this option.
Indeed if you're just wanting to play with no recording, VDXR is the way to go. SteamVR is like a tax.
@@Stereo3DProductions Thanks so much for getting back! That's what I experienced too.
should you not aim for 1.2x resolution for 1:1 to native res of the panel? as some of the resolution is lost to barrel correction
great video as always thankyou!
Render resolution, indeed, I hang around 1.15 to 1.25!
With encoder resolution there's a couple of tradeoffs, yes theoretically it helps to have it at 1.1 but, it enlarges the video stream which dillutes the bitrate, and thus affects quality. It's a delicate balancing act.
@@Stereo3DProductions For Quest 2 and Quest 3s, 4200x2100 total is native resolution after barrel correction and for Quest 3 its about 5000x2500.
Encoder resolution should be the actual panel size yeah.
Great video over all!
Only issue with 5000x2500 is that will defecate rusty nails on even mid end systems, which is why I put emphasis on 1.0 in this video. Yes, we want to maximize res, but we don't want players hitting 3 frames per second 🤭 so I try to go for a balanced starting point.
@@Stereo3DProductions You sure you read that correctly? 5000x2500 is the combined resolution, meaning 2500x2500 per eye ish. That's the real 1.0x imo (For Quest 3). I can't stand that that steamvr and quest software change the scaling with refresh rate.
Impossible to help people with problems when they just say "I run 1.2 resolution". Like that could mean ANYTHING especially when Quest Link / Virtual Desktop get stacked with steamvr scaling
Can you pleasee make a maxed out settings video for quest wired? For high end and low PCs.. most people I believe are still using wired, esp flight simulator and sim racers and this video is great!! 👍 ❤
Just take my wireless Airlink setup from here but jack the bitrate to 500Mbps! Should look nice and crisp, especially with sliced encoding enabled. I too still use the wire for iRacing since I need the least latency possible.
From two other channels ranking them it seems like air link is actually the worst unless you are in the same room as the router. Also I'm using a laptop Rtx2060 so I'm guessing treat it like the lower end setups?
Yep, the 2060 will run very similarly to my good ol GTX 1080... also I actually forgot to include one of my tests in this video: I thought I was softballing Airlink by having the router literally 6-12 feet away from me, so I did a session one floor under my router (still not too far away, but albeit with a slid structure in the way) and Airlink held the fort at 200Mbps which actually surprised me. I think a key factor is to have absolutely no interference, both on the wired and wifi network.
I switched router to Xiaomi AX6000 (not Redmi) and got 10G ethernet adapter (searched for 2.5G but got 10G really cheap) and now run Air Link at ERW thrown to 5000 (actually, stream resolution is capped internally to 4096x2240, so in your case it's the same too) with (!!!!) 960 Mbps (don't forget to set codec to H.264 and enable Sliced Encoding so it matches the cable settings). Really crazy. I run games at 4096x2208 at 120 Hz with RTX 2080 Ti (and i9-9980HK at 4.5 GHz) and just drop refresh rate for more demanding games. What's surprising - Beat Saber is playable at Expert+ on these settings (also playable with turning resolution to the max) as it still manages to sync the total latency into under 3 vsync intervals at 120 Hz, same as it uses at 10 Mbps. Also, the color accuracy here is THE BEST of all three software, perhaps due to they actually fully know what profiles are used or smth.
btw I also use VD (vrchat for example), and with some info I've heard from your vid, will try to fine-tune it again for some of my games.
Also some more info about Steam Link encoding resolution - it's set as FFR diameter for encoding of 2064x2208 image (look at the image at very low settings, you'll notice the center has same sharpness as at max, but the far edges will be yeeted), and is determined by Encode Resolution setting multiplied by SS. This zone reaches screen borders at 175% SS and starts shrinking at more. So it actually uses same "encoding ppd" at center of the image at any setting.
Something I need to note about SL: I've been messing with it a bit since I found out that they decided Encoder Resolution Width doesn't mean what it is supposed to mean and made it be something completely different... After many tests I HIGHLY doubt the stream is 2064x2208 per eye. It looks like 1800x2000ish at best. There's some upscaling and there's just no way to make it not ugly. The only saving grace is lowering Encoder Resolution Width doesn't change the encoder resolution width (The setting should be called Foveated Encoding Width) and makes it run a lot better.
If I had known this before making the video, I think SL would land a ~60% score rather than that rock bottom 53. Better, but it still sucks.
I'll soon make a new SL video on the second channel, where I'll try to determine once and for all what that awful resolution width is.
@@Stereo3DProductions I mean it's not using 2064x2208, but something like it takes a center area of that. As "encoding ppd/clarity/sharpness" doesn't change with settings.
Also edited the initial comment a bit, so if you switch router for a better one, go try 960 mbits over Air Link, that's HOLY SHIT the whole other level
960?! Holy crap that has to be perfect. With sliced encoding, provided it works well (I recall having had issues with it once) it must look amazing!!
Honey wake up, Bud posted a new video.
Hell yeah!
I pray one day we’ll be able to use virtual desktop with the link cable. Also I’m not sure if this works, but my pc has a wifi 6e antenna on it. Theoretically, if I were to connect my headset to the pc hotspot, would that be better than through the house wifi.
Yep, it would look like DisplayPort if Meta let VD use the USB API.
I wonder if that would work... wouldn't hurt to try tbh. You could maybe turn the adapter into an access point that can also see the PC itself on its network.
I use the hotspot on my PC and it's a great option instead of the second wifi router! For the first time you might have some issues with the connection. I had spikes for no reason and my speed was low. To solve it follow these steps that work for me:
1. Your PC should be wired.
2. Connect your mobile phone before your headset.
3. In my case I recreate a new hotspot name.
After that I haven't any issues and now just connect the headset.
So now I have about 10ms latency at ~110mbps
I used Virtual desktop for a long time with 3 diferent headsets, recently started using Steam Link to try the hand tracking and my experience has been mostly good. More reliable as with Virtual Desktop I often see compression artifacts and even lagspikes which I do not notice with SteamLink on a high-end setup.
About fidelity, the thing is that overall with VR, if you don't have one of those expensive enterprise high res headsets you will always notice the low PPI. And without an enthusiast-professional tier graphics card (80-90 series gpu)you will always see frame drops in some games. I just got used to the lack of visual fidelity since it doesn't differ much per program as long as you have a good connection. Maybe Airlink is the worst in my experience.
Also small comment on the video, you talked about the 70 series gpu being mid-end but the reality is that with a 3070-4070 you get well over 90fps at 2k high graphics in almost any game, that is not mid-end even by today's standards, that is high-end. As much as the labling has changed the 90 series is just a professional grade GPU like the Titan series was, Nvidia just replaced the label and nothing else.
And most people still buy 60 series, if you don't beleive me just look at the steam hardware survey. That is the mid-end.
When I say mid-end I mean more in the context of having a Quest 3 (4128x2208 base resolution, 2K PER eye) and stacking on resolution factors well above 1.0 you're going to easily hit a lot of walls with even a 4070. Yes, a 70 will definitely get you bang for the buck even on a Quest 3, albeit with softballed settings.
In general for pancake mode a 4070 can be considered high end.
@@Stereo3DProductions I mean sure you could classify them by usage but the cards themselves have tiers that have been generally accepted.
I understand your point tho, and it isn't that big of a deal.
And I guess by "pankake mode" you mean flatscreen, if yes then yeah 70 series are generally accepted as high-end cards.
"pancake", "lifeless", "flat"... yeah I mean monitors 🤭
Point being with a Quest 3 in VR, the 4070 will perform at the middle range of available hardware. There's no way around it. I am trying to line up people's expectations so they don't think they can run 8K 120Hz on a 4060. Having had this channel for a decade now I have seen things, so I cover.
@@Stereo3DProductions Yeah that is great m8. Keep it up!
I have a quest 3 and I use steam link because for whatever reason air link does not work, ive tried everything. It always lags so badly it leaves weird trail wherever i look and i have a 3070 oc and 600mbs 6e internet with the router in the same room. Ive tried every youtube toturial and got it to sorta work but still laggy
The trail is ASW freaking out because there is way too much latency. That is genuinely strange. Just to be sure, your PC is hooked up to the router by wire, yes?
@@Stereo3DProductions by Ethernet yeah, Its strange Ive even tried reinstalling it the meta quest program. Maybe I should get a AP and upgrade my internet speed. Definitely will buy virtual desktop soon.
I totally agree about the fact that VD is better picture quality than steam link / air link, but with my 4080 super, I have issues with 120hz mode in VD and I don’t have any with steam link with same resolution.
And steam link latency is WAAAAAY better !
A game like Arcade Paradise VR or Beat saber, I have issues with VD but none with Steam link.
And I honestly don’t know why, because few month ago steam link was so bad ! And now it’s feels very different.
90hz is great, but when you touch the feeling of 120hz, hard to come back to 90 😂
I still don’t know wich one of those pcvr app I’ll use mainly.
Looks like VD / Steamlink / air link are working very differently on each pc 😂
Steam Link on low foveated encoding width will in fact outclock all the other runtimes mainly because the stream's resolution is the lowest by far and cannot be adjusted at all; yeah if you're softballing the most important part, it'll run like lightning but also look a mess compared to anything else. From my tests I have not noticed a PC-to-PC difference: the differences very likely come down to network conditions and *maybe* the difference between AMD and nVidia GPU's, although I doubt that. They work almost the same from system to system.
What headstrap are u wearing? Is it better than BOBO ?
It's a really generic aftermarket strap I found on amazon. I don't know about BOBO, though. It's definitely better than the original strap.
I wonder how Steam VR while using OVR is compared to the others. Does OVR make it any better or is steam vr just shit if you have a quest 3 regardless? Great video! :)
My best answer to this is by writing a short SteamVR update log:
Update 1 Fixed 3 issues
Update 2 Created 3 new issues by implementing features that people *totally* wanted
Update 3 Fixed 3 issues we created, but created 3 more new issues in the process, along with two other new issues for another *really, totally* useful feature
It's basically how it's been going in a nutshell LOL (I even recall SteamVR managing to be shit with the Index sometimes)
@@Stereo3DProductions , Yeah I couldn't afford to get into VR until the Rift S came along. Guess I'll be using the oculus one for now then. Don't wanna buy the Virtual Desktop as I don't VR a LOT, but I do play in vr fairly regularly. Thanks for the update, Cheers!
Have you tried Steam Link? It's far from the best but it is after all free.
@@Stereo3DProductions , I have not really used any of the wireless options. I have a quest 3 nowadays that my grandmother bought me as a gift, and because I had a Rift S before that with no on board compute, I have just been using a cabled link connection up to this point. I am considering moving the ISP router into my bedroom to try some of the wireless stuff, which is why I came across your video. Needed to know if my shitty router was even capable, cuz if not it wouldn't be happening. I haven't gotten any further than that. Doesn't using Steam Link though lock you into using the steam codec and limiting my potential bandwidth? Did I misunderstand? I do not want to move over to wireless if it's going to be a lower fidelity feed than my wired connection, but I heard the wireless stuff on Ques 3 was pretty good, so just doing research for the moment. Thanks for the extra info though, I appreciate you taking the time.
Have you tried ALVR?
I have not! I probably should, should I?
@@Stereo3DProductions Yea, best part I find about ALVR is the platforms it supports. Downside is you have to sideload the apk to the headset.
@@Rocky_the_Protogen you dont need to sideload! its on the oculus store
do a link cable setup and compare it to VD
Already done and described in the video
VD gets beat if you jack the Link resolution to 1.3 and run at a bitrate of 500+ with an appropriate encoder resolution width.
What kills me is anything below that spec and VD beats wired Link plain and simple. Very impressive.
chekovs wine glass
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4128 in encoder width sadly don't do anything,
that value is hard limited to 4096
anything greater is overwrited on runtime to 4096
Yes, but 4096 is definitely not the default value, so at least you're forcing it to the max. If ever they do change that silly limit (less than 1% lol) then having the habit of putting in 4128 will do it.
Wow, how do you break glass like that without cutting yourself, risky!
Tell me you didn't watch the whole video without telling me you didn't watch the whole video 😂😂😂😂😂
It's breakaway glass! It's so much fun it's a crime that it is so expensive!
How you gonna have a 4080 and wifi 5 router!?
How you gonna ask useless quesitons like that?
PS: My whole house is ethernet wired as wifi sucks for general networking.
You forgot to include ALVR.
It's not a major player.
However I do plan on trying it at some point.
Bro can you please do comparison between Virtual Desktop and Standable for Full Body Estimation (FBE tracking), i just got quest pro as it has eye tracking but it does not work natively in vr chat so i am searching how i can enable face tracking and body estimation tracking
first option is wired connection via cable link(currently searching how to do this before buying a link cable)
second option is using Virtual Desktop / standable to achieve Full Body Estimation
and even if i use second option of going wireless i am not sure which internet pakage to get as currently i have 50mbps which i know is low as the image gets too blurry and laggy
I don't know what Standable is but keep in mind bitrate for wireless VR has *nothing do do with your internet bitrate*.
The signal for wireless VR never leaves your home, nor does the wireless VR driver get anything from outside your home. The speed limit you have is dictated by your router and may well be at a MINIMUM of 800Mbps if not triple that.
@@Stereo3DProductionsthanks for replying bro, i am planning to get a new router and increasing my pakage speed to 300mps so i can try virtual desktop to try out full body estimation wirelessly
right now i wanna spend as less money as possible since i just bought quest pro, i want to find out if i can do full body tracking via cable link (will have to buy cable link for this)
@@roccoeditor You don't need internet speed this is between your PC and your Headset. Make sure your pc is Wired into the router and router having WiFI6 is super helpful.
@@Trigger911yeah i have a really old router, thats why i am going to buy new wifi6 router (i believe its 5 GHz) so i can use virtual desktop
@@roccoeditor yea that would be helpful :) I just didnt want to see you upgrade your internet plan and not get any benefit lol
Hi, gt video, can you advise, I have cpu ryzen 9 5900 and gpu rtx 4070,, I have a quest 3, I've tried virtual desktop, steam vr, airline, I just cannot get the vr to run smooth, I get latency, stuttering, black screens when I return my head with the quest on,, I never had this problem before when I had rtx 3060 and ryzen 7 300, sometimes the first few minutes the games seem OK, then fall apart, I do not have wifi 6, and I'm getting 320mbps speed, any ideas, best regards
Is your PC wired to your network or using wifi? You *have* to have the PC wired to begin with.
My pc is wired
I think your router is the bottleneck. You'd better upgrade to Wifi 6 :)
@@pyton9553 I agree he's got decent specs. He might just need to get closer to his router also a lot people I have helped are too far away.
For Meta Air Link, I disagree with him on 'link sharpening', and think it should be turned on. It looks better.
The lower you set your resolution, the more link sharpening becomes useful.
However above 1.0x there's no point as it will induce shimmer rather than improve anything.
i use airLink but still need to use steamlink because of steam games :/
Huh? You can fully use Airlink with Steam games.
@Stereo3DProductions yes sorry i confused steamlink with steamVR ahha ups
Oh yeahhhh... if you meant SteamVR... it's a struggle. Not only do we run two runtimes, but SteamVR is so often scuffed. One minute it's doing great, then an update comes in and destroys the entire planet lol
But what app is best in terms of latency + quality?
I usually play airlink for beat saber
Airlink is honestly honorable... you likely shouldn't need anything better UNLESS you find yourself looking at actual issues and being bothered by them... as long as you avoid Steam Link, you are good, as SL is far, far behind in everything.
@@Stereo3DProductions I actually don't see it being far behind, if at all.
Just tried comparing stutters vs quality vs latency on my setup and steam link is kinda good in this, airlink was second and vd just can't give me a middle ground between medium and high on quality, as well as it strangely lags with 200 mbps bitrate, I find it could not automatically adjust bitrate to my network conditions, which is also strange, quality looks good tho
Overall it feels like steam link is easiest, plug and play experience, I could leave everything on defaults and get a decent experience.
With airlink I struggle with that stupid old oculus dashboard interface, and lack of user facing settings - going into debug tool every time is bruh
VD has most settings but its runtime seems to be not the best currently (compared to steamvr and meta openxr), some settings are outright useless to me, like ssw, upscaling
but that's just my config, VR gaming always felt harder to setup compared to flatscreen
Steam Link is objectively a piece of trash, though. It is not even close, not even to Airlink. Please avoid it as you are squandering whatever extra resolution and game render you are trying to go for. The encoder resolution width is so low on Steam Link, the max it will send to your headset is 3072x1642... the Quest 3's native res is 4128x2208. That is a crime and those who made Steam Link should be fired. You can set your render resolution to 6000x3000 it will STILL send a crappy 3072x1642 stream (maximum, mind you, if you are using the slider and don't force max the encoder resolution width, you are actually getting 2688x1436 resolution OR LOWER sent to your headset.)
Please for the love of god do not legitimize that piece of trash.
PS: The Airlink dev tool might be BRUH but at least that runtime allows us to run at 2024 resolutions by taking two minutes to change three values.
VD is by far the best runtime and wireless interface by the way. Again, objectively, with multiple experiements performed. Cut in stone. You need to watch the entire Steam Link segment along with the rating segment of this video. VD gets 90%, Airlink 76% and Steam Link 53%.
@@Stereo3DProductions That was simply my experience, I judged by what I saw in the headset, its not trash
I believe SL "encoded video size" is not what you think it is. For me it changes the size of area that is in focus, not blurred.
This has to do with variable rate supersampling, where you give quality only to the part of the image where you look
So it is not the same setting as in oculus debug tool
And of course for quest 2/3 it would be just big constant area in front, only on quest pro it would work with eye tracking
Also trying to override the setting in config to the value that the UI does not let you... tells you that you probably should not do that, Valve on their support page recommends max 1280
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Excellent video, but for the love of god it's meta and not maeta.
thanks for the detailed comparison
Let's be real it's actually still just Facebook in the guise of some random name they made up. Like they're wearing cheap plastic glasses with fake moustache going "I don't know who this Facebook guy is, I am Meta". I do not mind perpetually butchering this name.
Fair enough lol. I still call any quest headset an Oculus quest. To be fair to them though it isn’t really facebook anymore. At this point it would be like Google being called Gmail or something. They certainly kept the questionable business practices though
with openvr fsr steam link runs better than airlink
debug tool (oculus folder)
(sevices)
pixel override 1.6
spacewarp off
(link)
v codec h265
encode res 2944
link sharpen quality
dimming enabled
(router settings)
for using router as dedicated vr
set to ap mode system/mode/
disable twt, smart connect and 2.4ghz mode
change channel width to 80mhz
set channel to on that is not in use will depend on your devices i.e mines 40
change broadcast mode to ax only
now find beacon interval set that as low as it can go mines at 40
then rts,dtim,groupkey same thing as low as it can go
wmm should be on
ap isolation off
airtime fairness off
also reserve ips for both the headset and pc (check there on device mac on the network beforehand)i.e wifi settings privacy use device mac
restart
this is how i got mine working properly 1.1ms/11.1ms on steam 6-14 ms to display
that encoder resolution is wayyyyyyyyy too low! yes you will get less delay but damn that's so low.
@@Stereo3DProductions I thought that after watching the vid I might try your res with no supersample
I would expect a tad more latency but visually, you'll notice a big improvement.
@@Stereo3DProductions the difence in lag is massive might be the diffence in systems but mine is bast for a mid rage system
Don’t you find that VD looks washed out?
It depends on what codec you select... while I prefer H265 10-bit I do have to tweak the gamma to avoid it being too bright: I use a value of 0.85 to make it look similar to the other codecs. If this brightnessbothers you, try using AV1 10-bit instead. It's a very good efficient codec that is a lot less bright.
As you'll see on my side by side comparisons, though, VD is not more or less bright or washed out than the others in any significant way. I surmise the two H264 codecs are actually darker if anything.
@ Thank you for your reply. I played the Arizona sunshine remake on stream link and VD. The game looked so much better on steam link for me. Colours were great and resolution was really high. VD in comparison looked very washed out and pixelated.
Resolution is objectively lower on Steam Link (unless you compare to VD on potato or low) as Steam Link uses a fixed stream resolution that is definitely lower than the Quest 3's native resolution. (Although it may look fine on Quest 2 or 3S because i think the Steam Link stream resolution is slightly larger than Q2's native res)
@ I was playing games like re7 praydog mod, into the radius 2, lone echo, and metro awakening yesterday. VD does look sharp and performance is very good. However, no matter what codec I try it always looks compressed more on VD to me. Definitely the foveated rendering is more aggressive on steam link, and it’s not noticeable on VD. I can run a game like HLA on VD on godlike. Zero compression and performance is buttery smooth.
There is a situation here that most people misunderstand, and since Steam hasn't clearly specified it, it creates confusion. The 'encode video size (px)' actually functions as FOV rendering In other words, it determines how much of (px) the screen will be displayed in high resolution
You can lower this value gradually and observe the center and edges of the image to see for yourself
In my opinion, this shows how unsuccessful Steam is at explaining how it manages these settings. Despite searching a lot in text files, I still haven't found a method to precisely adjust the encoding resolution From what I understand, they prefer to leave these settings within SteamVR So, while these are connected but separate, you need to find a balance that suits you from the menu.
Yep from the comments here I gathered that much. Steam Link decided to be special and misname Foveated Encoding Width. However I did further testing after making this video and I can now say while lowering Foveated Encoding Width it RUNS a lot better, but the problem is it always looks like crap.
I highly suspect the real stream resolution is around 80% the Quest 3 resolution and we can't change it, hence why it's just always inferior, but also runs better for those who have issues with stutter. If you softball the stream dimensions of course it'll stutter less. As I said to another commenter, this would actually raise my Steam Link overall score in the 60's as opposed to low 50's. A big gain, but still last in the line.