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Comment by daemonologist | Hacker News Reader

The latency is brutal though, compared to content running on-device or a headset with regular display input. I'm particularly prone to motion sickness though - it might be an acceptable tradeoff if you're not.

(Image compression over wireless or even USB is noticeable as well, but I can overlook that for the price.)

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Not my experience at all. Streaming over WiFi had no noticeable latency, but I did have to upgrade my WiFi AP to one that supported -AC and have it only a couple of meters from the VR headset.

I actually expected it to kinda suck and was very impressed when it worked as well as it does.

This is on a Quest 2, not a Quest 3 however. Experiences may vary.

I'm using a dedicated TP-Link Archer AX53 (just WiFi 6, not WiFi 6E) with Quest 3 and Virtual Desktop for PCVR. Turns out the WiFi bandwidth and latency is not really a problem, rather my older GPU (Radeon RX590) is the bottleneck, struggling to encode all the needed frames in real time.

I'll mention that the single most impactful upgrade you can make to a PC for VR is to get an AMD X3D CPU. X3D CPUs really smooth out p99+ frame times which results in a tremendous improvement to the VR experience (which is dominated by outlier frame times).

Thanks, sounds like a possibly nice upgrade path in the future! :)

In your case, with an RX 590, do NOT buy an expensive x3D processor expecting any improvement. I upgraded from an RX580 (using an original HTC Vive) to an RX 5700xt (and a valve Index) and that's the position you are in. You cannot drive a high pixel density VR headset with a Mid tier GPU from 8 years ago.

Get something that is at least as powerful as that RX 5700xt I had (I now have a 4070 super) and you will be satisfied. It drove my Index at 90hz.

Ah I didn't realize it was that old. Well, in that case I'd recommend both a graphics card and a CPU upgrade.

In my gaming PC (with a 4070 Ti so a pretty strong GPU) I replaced a 5600X with a 5700X3D. It has made my VR experience essentially perfect.

What games do you play in VR? I know you say the outlier frame times were a huge problem for you but it really seems like such a small performance bump to get such a huge perceptual benefit.

Most of my VR time is in Beat Saber -- I'd have occasional, quite distracting frame drops with a 5600X that have completely gone away with a relatively cheap upgrade to a 5700X3D.

I'd personally argue that smoothing out outlier frametimes is not a small performance bump! As an engineer I care a lot about tail latency for services, and I feel like tail latency ends up being even more critical for high-fidelity gaming experiences like VR.

I don't notice any latency whatsoever. If you're not exaggerating and are genuinely experiencing "brutal" latency, then something is definitely wrong with your setup.

Not necessarily. Some people are just less sensitive to latency, so even if a 20ms added delay might not be noticeable to you, it doesn't mean that other people won't feel it.

What kind of network setup were you using? The usual recommendation is that for best results you need a dedicated access point (not serving any other devices), in the same room as the headset, and with ethernet backhaul all the way to the PC server. Using a shared access point or multiple WiFi hops might work but YMMV.

Thanks for the recommendation; I was mostly using USB (3.2 Gen 2x1), as I found it much better than wireless but still not quite good enough. The wireless setup I tried was a 6e router connected to the PC over 1Gb ethernet, but there were other devices on the network.

I've heard virtual desktop can be lower latency, haven't tried it. I should say that even native Quest games are borderline for me as far as latency/nausea so there isn't much margin.

Latency for me on a Quest 3 with a Puppis router + Virtual Desktop is around 45ms. I personally haven't found 45ms to be a problem (it's comparable to many TVs without game mode) but YMMV!

I had little issues with wireless but it was really important to have a fully gigabit capable wireless router and have my computer hardwired. I had it on a separate network because I had to buy a router that could specifically handle gigabit wireless and didn't want other things interfering. I definitely noticed issues playing Minecraft with shaders on because it's just so much data but it was only in wide open areas and I found it more fun to build or mine in VR!

Sister comments are addressing the Wi-fi part. There's of course also the host part which has to keep up with the rendering and sustain performance.

Overall VR streaming is IMHO still very finicky for anyone who's not dumping buckets of time or money into it head first.

In particular for people wanting to get into VR who were not specifically into PC gaming, there's so much things to catch up and the whole gaming ecosystem to digest. It's a lot.

I have to agree on the latency issues. While i luckily didn't get any motion sickness from it i found it very distracting and never got used to it, even after several weeks of regular use playing several simracing games. After a lot of tinkering I got i got it down to around 30-35ms with virtual desktop, but found it still very distracting.

Switching to a headset with a DP cable was night and day to me in terms of immersion!

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