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
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
steam link has this option for FOVEATED ENCODING(don't mistake with foveated rendering). it's 1536 for each eye for the CENTER of picture. If you set it at lowest you can clearly see where it ends and lower resolution encoding starts. It is done to make lower bitrates more usable and give more GPU performance as it also uses foveated rendering and comparing every streamer at 25mb/s it has best quality. Best part is that it supports quest pro's eye tracking for it also codec is HEVC and works well even at 100 and at 350 it has 0 lag and artifacts with quest 2 at full foveated encoding width But I agree that it has blurriest image because it has 0 sharpening I have vega 64 and steam link gives me worst picture quality at 100%(but on par with other tools at 400%), but best performance and lowest latency, idk what is wrong with rtx 4000 not working properly with steam link also steam link does not use time warp... Idk where you have seen such artifacts, it is probably encoder bug
So what bothers me is as I've recently found out, while ERW means one thing for all other interfaces, Steam Link decided to make it mean something else. Either way it still looks like upscaled junk, I am 100% certain they do not in fact pass a full resolution stream to the headset. I will however experiment more at lower "encoder resolution width" (or valve's redefinition of) for fun just to see if it's less dogshit. Its biggest flaw is, as shown in this video, the fact that you can't save this thing even with 300Mbps it still looks like a 360p UA-cam video. PS: All the other interfaces use sliced encoding as well, I can actually see it well on my VD and Airlink onboard captures, but not on the SL captures.
Side note I find sharpening to actually hurt the image unless you're upscaling. It's basically anti anti aliasing. I don't think the blurriness comes from the lack of sharpening, I think it comes from a low resolution on the overall stream width.
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!
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.
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.
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
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 !
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
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 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.
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)
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!
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
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.
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
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!
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)
Thank you for this, lately its been hard finding good wireless PCVR settings information all in one place.
Me "totally" not realising due to this vid that I just upgraded from a quest 2 to 3 because of steam link resolution issues 😂
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.
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?
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.
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.
now thats how you open a video 🕺🕺🕺
THANKS 15 ENJOY STAY!
Thank God you showed up on my algorithm, thanks for this comparison vid
Thanks man. Just got my quest 3. This sure did help me out. Great info
steam link has this option for FOVEATED ENCODING(don't mistake with foveated rendering). it's 1536 for each eye for the CENTER of picture. If you set it at lowest you can clearly see where it ends and lower resolution encoding starts. It is done to make lower bitrates more usable and give more GPU performance as it also uses foveated rendering and comparing every streamer at 25mb/s it has best quality. Best part is that it supports quest pro's eye tracking for it
also codec is HEVC and works well even at 100 and at 350 it has 0 lag and artifacts with quest 2 at full foveated encoding width
But I agree that it has blurriest image because it has 0 sharpening
I have vega 64 and steam link gives me worst picture quality at 100%(but on par with other tools at 400%), but best performance and lowest latency, idk what is wrong with rtx 4000 not working properly with steam link
also steam link does not use time warp... Idk where you have seen such artifacts, it is probably encoder bug
So what bothers me is as I've recently found out, while ERW means one thing for all other interfaces, Steam Link decided to make it mean something else. Either way it still looks like upscaled junk, I am 100% certain they do not in fact pass a full resolution stream to the headset.
I will however experiment more at lower "encoder resolution width" (or valve's redefinition of) for fun just to see if it's less dogshit. Its biggest flaw is, as shown in this video, the fact that you can't save this thing even with 300Mbps it still looks like a 360p UA-cam video.
PS: All the other interfaces use sliced encoding as well, I can actually see it well on my VD and Airlink onboard captures, but not on the SL captures.
Side note I find sharpening to actually hurt the image unless you're upscaling. It's basically anti anti aliasing. I don't think the blurriness comes from the lack of sharpening, I think it comes from a low resolution on the overall stream width.
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!
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!
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.
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!!
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
Nice intro, couldn't tell if it was real or not.
That was more fun that it should have been lol
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.
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 !
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 :)
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 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.
Great informative video. Best one on this subject- switching to virtual desktop!
Thanks! Do report back with your experience! 😎
Banger 🙌
h Waffl3
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)
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!
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 :)
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
You forgot to include ALVR.
It's not a major player.
However I do plan on trying it at some point.
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.
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 :)
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.
Honey wake up, Bud posted a new video.
Hell yeah!
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