Can anyone provide this information?The only interest I have in the Quest 3, is if it can provide a better experience than the Quest 2 for PCVR. The Quest 3 has Wi-Fi 6e capability, but will it improve latency and video compression of the Quest 2?Right now the Quest 2 averages 47 to 57ms of latency, that and the video compression is unacceptable for people who use PCVR headsets with zero compression and 11ms of latency.I'm going to order one from Amazon, so I can return it if it can't improve on the Quest 2, but any help before hand would be appreciated 🙂

Yeah, everything you said is spot on. If they can just get the latency down in the 20's I could live with that.I guess I'm going to have to wait until someone who knows the ins and outs of PCVR to get one in their hands to do some testing. I would pre order now, but they conveniently didn't announce anything of substance that we didn't already know, and Amazon doesn't have them for sale yet, so I guess I'm just going to wait to see some reviews from the VR streaming community.Just checked Amazon, and they are now showing up for pre-order.

So a headset that hasn't been released yet is a failure because a single analyst wrote a short medium blog post with zero cited sources that claims vr headsets won't sell well in 2024. Then some gaming website I've never heard of uses that medium post as its sole source for this "shocking" news. The article suggesting that thousands of jobs lost at facebook and instagram might be caused by predicting the Quest 3 won't sell well is utter bull**bleep**.

By now many of you have probably seen the YouTube video on pushing the Q3 up to over 900Mbps on Airlink. Well holy #$@! it works. I'm using a static 700Mbps on Airlink with H.264, maxed out encode width and there's just no more artifacting nor perceivable latency increase. Virtual Desktop has also rolled out similar gains and is also incredible, supporting 10-bit video codecs and Snapdragon super resolution upscaling. This is a huge leap in quality and performance over the Q2, It's just... astounding. This is, presently, the best PCVR headset I've tried. Best in every category, no, but equal or exceed in most of them and no friggin wire!

Go to Oculus Windows app and Set the Resolution on 1,5x and in Steam Vr on 200%.then Go in the Airlink Menü, not the settings, this where you can exit it , and switch to fix bandwith and Set it up to 200mb/s.its so nice , an i use it with 5ghz wlan.today i played Derail ♥️♥️🥰🥰 it sooooo awsome with the Quest 3 , and HL2 Mod, Asgarth Wrath and and … Uhhh im in love with the Quest 3 since 3 weeks 😻😻

The biggest benefit I can see is the decoding time as the GPU is 2x more powerful than that of the Quest 2. Virtual desktop breaks down the total latency for you in catagorys...game, encode, network and decode. For me decode is the highest at about 12ms so in theory the Q3 has the opportunity of lowering that a fair bit. The Quest 3 also supports the AV1 codec which should boost visuals but only with an Nvidia 4000 card or AMD 7000 WiFi 6e will certainly help and may allow you to push the bandwidth higher, however so does the Quest pro and people haven't really noticed any latency improvement with that headset. Keeping in mind of course, the Quest 3 will be harder to run at its native resolution thus creating a higher latency from the computer side which may reduce your potential gains

Meta Quest 3 bitrate and latency for PCVR over Wi-Fi 6e, Air Link, and USB C

30 Replies

J40NYR
MVP
2 years ago
The biggest benefit I can see is the decoding time as the GPU is 2x more powerful than that of the Quest 2. Virtual desktop breaks down the total latency for you in catagorys...game, encode, network and decode. For me decode is the highest at about 12ms so in theory the Q3 has the opportunity of lowering that a fair bit. The Quest 3 also supports the AV1 codec which should boost visuals but only with an Nvidia 4000 card or AMD 7000

WiFi 6e will certainly help and may allow you to push the bandwidth higher, however so does the Quest pro and people haven't really noticed any latency improvement with that headset.

Keeping in mind of course, the Quest 3 will be harder to run at its native resolution thus creating a higher latency from the computer side which may reduce your potential gains
- Maxxgold
  Rising Star
  2 years ago
  Yeah, everything you said is spot on. If they can just get the latency down in the 20's I could live with that.
  I guess I'm going to have to wait until someone who knows the ins and outs of PCVR to get one in their hands to do some testing.
  I would pre order now, but they conveniently didn't announce anything of substance that we didn't already know, and Amazon doesn't have them for sale yet, so I guess I'm just going to wait to see some reviews from the VR streaming community.
  Just checked Amazon, and they are now showing up for pre-order.
kojack
MVP
2 years ago
If you mainly want PCVR, the newly leaked Pico 5 Max might be more your style. Same CPU as the Quest 3, 3840x3840 per eye, eye tracking and has a display port for direct uncompressed video. (Plus can run stand alone or Airlink style wireless)

But its not due until at least 2024.
- Maxxgold
  Rising Star
  2 years ago
  Ok, wow. Yeah, that sounds exactly what I'm looking for. This is the first I've heard about it. Thank you.
  I really don't understand why Meta would shift their focus to AR and not push towards PC VR more. Steam has the Quest 2 as its most used VR headset. It's a no brainer to let the headset connect directly to a GPU.
tanubon
Heroic Explorer
2 years ago
Meta must improve Link... Link uses tooooo much VRAM. And granularity of the image is worse than VD. Snapdragon Super Resolution (Quality Mode) doesn't make it better unlike VD... so most people don't have merit to use Link (I uses Link, though. Because I want 900Mbps of Wired Link).
- Maxxgold
  Rising Star
  2 years ago
  They need to just connect to the Display Port and all the problems would be solved. I'm not sure what they are even doing at this point.
  - Pandages
    Protege
    2 years ago
    Maxxgold directly connecting to a GPU over DisplayPort or HDMI sounds like a good idea but it comes with a bunch of new challenges. The biggest one is bandwidth: display cables can carry 40gbps or more these days. The signal integrity on a high bandwidth cable mean good cable handling, cable management, and restrictive cable lengths.
    
    USB 3.1 using a Type-C port is a lot more flexible. Encoding the video data using H.265 or AV1 might cause some visible artifacts but cuts the bandwidth requirement from ~32gbps minimum to a mere 300mbps. That's a less than 1% as much bandwidth required, which allows us to use: Airlink, USB hubs, extension cables, etc.
    
    DisplayPort full-bandwidth cables *must* be optical to reach longer lengths. USB-C can reach 20 feet without optics, making it massively cheaper to replace. And you can see evidence of this in the price for a replacement cable for The Index ($100-200) versus a generic 20gbps USB-C cable ($10-20).
    
    I think that's a REALLY important point to make in this conversation.
Maxxgold
Rising Star
2 years ago
Meta Quest 3 demand allegedly 5 million units below expected level | PCGamesN
If you are reading this, don't waste your money on the Quest 3. It's already a failure and people are losing their jobs. Just wait until the Quest 3 hits the 299.00 or lower to pick one up. They will be giving them away soon for failing to make the Quest 3 more PC VR compatible and thinking that anyone wants mixed reality.
kojack
MVP
2 years ago
So a headset that hasn't been released yet is a failure because a single analyst wrote a short medium blog post with zero cited sources that claims vr headsets won't sell well in 2024. Then some gaming website I've never heard of uses that medium post as its sole source for this "shocking" news.

The article suggesting that thousands of jobs lost at facebook and instagram might be caused by predicting the Quest 3 won't sell well is utter bull**bleep**.
DaftnDirect
MVP
2 years ago
In other news, Meta have sold out of the 512 pre-orders, so have Amazon.. and John Lewis.. and looks like Argos only have 128, that's here in the UK. And those job losses happened in the spring, before the Quest 3 supply chain existed, following the end of covid and a downturn in our cosey stay-at-home lifestyles. Anyway, yeah, it's all the fault of not having a display port... ok.

Ming Chi Kuo, the man with the pessimistic view there. He's 76.6% accurate according to Apple.Fandom... that .6 makes all the difference.

With all the positive reviews, it's totally natural for the negative stories to appear, it's the only way to be noticed.
Geezik
Protege
2 years ago
For me main thing might be that it supports 160MHz band for AX Wifi - which is plenty of bandwidth!
tanubon
Heroic Explorer
2 years ago
When does Meta update Oculus client for Quest3? Godin implements more & more for VD. I don't use VD. But it's true that there isn't merit to use Link except "960Mbps on wired" & "free" now.
- DaftnDirect
  MVP
  2 years ago
  I bought Virtual Desktop a while back but only used it a couple times, I really need to get back and give it a thorough testing, otherwise I'm not getting my money's worth.
  
  A lot of people say it's better than Air Link, and I think the only reason I haven't used it much is because my Air Link is very good. As mentioned already, maybe it's the Quest Pro's WiFi hardware that has better signal reception (I don't have a 6e router) or the processor boost improves decompression.
  
  I used wired Link with my Quest 2 all the time for PCVR and still use it with the Pro when I'm having a static seated PCVR experience... or any PC session that's going to go past the headset battery life. If you have to plug into a battery pack when playing PCVR, you may as well use wired Link. I just don't like the cable when it's something like Fallout and you're moving your head and arms a lot. OK for MSFS and racing sims as long as I don't keep running my chair over the cable.
Geezik
Protege
2 years ago
All right, have Elite Dangerous in VR a try, with cranked settings - rendering at 4128x2208, HEVC encoding at 4064 width, and 200Mbps over airlink (AX wifi, 160MHz, 3 meters from me on head level).

Image is stunning, latency not though 😄 I had between 60 and 80few ms.
- rmzalbar
  Expert Protege
  2 years ago
  Are you using the 6GHz band, or just 5GHz AX?
  - Geezik
    Protege
    2 years ago
    I'm on 5GHz, from the network standpoint 6GHz does not give you a lot more - 5GHz 4x4 MIMO setup is able to push ~2Gbits trough air between two linux hosts. The usual bonus for 6GHz are less crowded channels, but that's not the issue for me, rarely anything here up in the air. I kinda feel like introducing 6GHz to the bunch was mostly for that reason, in populated areas wifi nowadays is a mess, often with people having unregulated 5Ghz radio links pushing few W.
    
    And the best result of my yesterday tinkering is... ...burned in ODT performance overlay on my Quest 3 screen!
    Nowadays LCDs should not burn in, right? o_0
rmzalbar
Expert Protege
2 years ago
I've now tested with a separate PC and a completely different 6E router (Asus ROG Strix AXE16000, a beast of a performer.) None of my changes made a significant difference. Airlink seems to struggle to maintain stable performance on 5GHz AX, and fails to maintain stable performance on 6GHz AXE. Virtual Desktop runs excellent even at very high bitrates and quality settings on both protocols.
I have no way of testing this, but I have the impression that something is not right with the Link client side services on the Quest 3. I hope this gets addressed soon.