Oculus Quest randomly disconnecting from PC

[Muttster]

Alright to walk this through step by step, I load up my Quest (I don't know if the size matters but the 32 GB one but I play through the PC), set my boundary, reset my view so I'm centered, and then plug my Quest into my PC via a 3rd party link cable. I enable the transfer of data between my Quest and my PC and click Enable Link or whatever the little button on the taskbar in Quest OS says to launch me to my desktop (stopped paying attention to what it said long ago. I just know rectangle next to status of my devices put me in happy place). Once that's set and loaded, I click the VR button on Steam to load into Steam VR. Once I'm in, I select what game I want to play and bam here we go.

So this started happening about a week ago but I'll just be mid game and suddenly my vision will go black for like half of a second and suddenly I'm looking at the Quest menu. Not like the Oculus software on my PC. Like as if I'm not linked to my PC but the button will pop back up like not even a second later to enable link again. Now if I could just click the button and be put right back to where I was, I'd be like okay whatever that's a dumb little hiccup. Instead, I have to pull the headset up, take off the controllers, navigate my PC, and click the Steam prompt to either quit or restart Steam VR because my device was disconnected. At first I thought this was maybe just crashes but I will see on one of my monitors my game still running happily, even my friends waving in my face wondering where the hell I went but my HMD won't display anything, not even the Oculus Home software, I can't press the Oculus button to bring up the taskbar, just no interaction.

So I have to click restart Steam VR, wait for that to load, my headset to start displaying things, load my game up, rejoin my friends and it'll happen again in some arbitrary amount of time, not usually more than 15 minutes is when it can happen again and I assume you get it's frustrating.

Like is something wrong with my HMD? I tried a couple spare cables I have lying around and all give me the same result. Just half of an hour ago, I even tried wrapping the cable around my neck (I absolutely strangled myself trying that lmao) and leaving some slack for the connection to the cable and played very gently but it just did all of that again where it blacked out for half of a second and popped me back up to the Quest OS menu, with the enable link button popping up quickly after.

I'm really not sure what changed from the point of purchase to a week ago when I started having issues. Software update? Oculus being more egregious with pushing their $80 cable when a regular 3rd party cable was working just fine up until this point? I just wanna play some damn VR games with friends. Any suggestions for things to try would be appreciated, or if anyone knows exactly what's going on, I'd love to know so I can hopefully get back to playing.

Thank you!

[brianrubin]

Hey what's the USB test tool?

[B1uto]

In Oculus Home select Devices.  Then on right side is USB test.  It tests. the quality of your USB link.

[chert1024VR]

If anybody is currently in contact with Oculus Support, just tell them to downgrade the headset firmware from V27 to V26. Most if not all of these problems will be resolved.

[Siphedious]

I recently opened up a ticket with them. Is downgrading the firmware something we can do on our own, or do we need Oculus to do it for us? 

[chert1024VR]

Not possible now to downgrade the firmware to an earlier one. I've tried to manually do it but nothing happened and the V27 firmware was still there. I guess Oculus locked this feature to prevent manual updates that could go bad and possibly brick the headset.

It's kinda like motherboard BIOS flashing which has inherent risks but motherboard manufacturers still allow owners to do this since it is still the owner's choice whether or not he wants to. Most owners/users who do this are tech-savvy enough to perform this procedure successfully.

But the safest way in this case is for Oculus themselves to do the firmware downgrade via their usual method of updating the firmware.

[Siphedious]

In a sad way that's kind of a relief, as I've rooted phones/tablets and that's always a little anxiety-provoking, and from the research efforts I'd started I wasn't thrilled about the idea of doing it with my headset.

I'm hoping to hear back from Oculus today, and depending on what they say, I'll mention the FW concern.

The other potential solution I've heard is to use Virtual Desktop. As someone who bought a VR-capable laptop specifically to be able to do PCVR portably, it would be a bit of a frustration to find out that I could have just gone that route instead of spending hours Googling and spending money on cabling and tinkering with settings trying to sort this out. The only upside would be that I think that laptop is still within the return window.

[Siphedious]

Oculus Support got back to me and claimed that downgrading the firmware wasn't an option. They've asked me to send them my log file, so I'll be doing that, and I guess we'll see what happens next.

[Siphedious]

Disabling the integrated graphics card in Device Manager, at Oculus's suggestion, worked. I've been able to enable the link successfully ever since I did that, and confirmed that if I re-enable the integrated graphics card then I lose the ability to enable the link until I disable the integrated graphics again.

It seems excessive that I should need to go as far as disabling my integrated graphics, and it's a little frustrating that such an easy (if excessive) step isn't already posted as a suggestion anywhere online that I could find. I did try a number of other ways of forcing the Oculus software to use my discrete graphics previously, but clearly I didn't find the right options, if any, to make that happen.

I don't know whether it's related or not, but I also haven't had any success getting Google Earth VR to work with my laptop, whether I ran the version from the Oculus Store or the version available via Steam. However, I was able to get it to run from my desktop PC via Virtual Desktop, and unless anyone's aware of an easy fix, I'm not interested in pursuing this further.

I'm probably going to return my laptop. I'd bought it expressly so that I could run PCVR games, and the contortions I had to go through to make it work, and the fact that I seem to be having as much if not more success using Virtual Desktop with my desktop PC at this point, seem to make my laptop unnecessary. I may end up buying a different laptop (one recommended on the Oculus site) to replace the one I have, but I haven't finalized any decisions on that yet.

[ngl.robert]

Using Quest 2 with Assetto Corsa, I get disconected when the world is dearest to me. Coming from a Rift S, this is by far the worse VR experience yet. Definitely not something I would recommend anyone to buy tbh, I hate it. I hope they release the Air Link soon and is more stable.

I'm just venting after loosing a 20 minutes race I was leading because of poor hardware from Oculus, sorry I don't have anything helpful to say.

[B1uto]

After trouble shooting this with Oculus support for 6 weeks, I replaced my link USB cable, and It instantly resolved.