Quest Pro - Link regluarly drops frames

[Fortytwoish]

Hey there 🙂 Bought a Quest Pro after the price drop and I'm very impressed!

One issue I suffer from is Quest Link performance. There is regular judder and it's generally not very smooth, after digging around the Debug Views I could catch it: (Note Link framerate dipping to 84Hz very regularly and the high dropped frame count)

With 90Hz @ max resolution it regularly drops multiple frames per second. With 72hz @ default resolution it will drop a frame every second. Both very regular.

Application framerate is not an issue (just oculus dash is open, plenty of headroom), neither is the cable (USB Test shows green w/ 2.6Gbps transfer rate). Encoding, Transfer, Decoding times are all well below 11.1ms (~6.8ms total)

I am on a fresh windows 11 install with barely any other software running ATM. 4090, 5950x, 32GB RAM. Nvidia driver 531.29.

Any ideas what else I could try?

[MetaQuestSupport]

Hey hey, @Fortytwoish! We just wanted to slide on by to lend a hand with this dropped frames issue you're having; we know how this can put a damper on your excitement after getting a new device! We have located the following article to lend a hand with this issue: Link graphics performance preferences. We hope this article helps provide you more information; if not, try the following:
 

Manually assign the GPU
You can use Windows to manually assign which GPU is used by a specific process. This should have little to no side effects. To do so:

1. Close the Oculus Desktop software
    
2. Open Windows Settings > System > Display > Graphics Settings
    
3. Select Classic App from the drop down and click Browse
4. Select the OculusClient.exe
   (By default, this will be installed C:\Program Files\Oculus\Support\oculus-client\OculusClient.exe)
5. Click Options > High Performance > Save
   Ensure the "High Performance" option has your dedicated graphics at the top of this menu.

 Set Oculus Process Priority
You can manually set the process priority to see if this will automatically assign the process to high performance. This should have few side effects.

1. Open Task Manager
2. Go to the Details tab
3. Find OVRServer_x64.exe
4. Right click on it and select Set Priority
5. Set this priority to High
6. Repeat steps 4 - 6 for VirtualDesktop.streamer.exe

Ultimate Performance Power Plan
You can change your Windows 10+ power plan to prefer higher performance over lower power consumption. The side effect of this should be a higher power consumption and lowered battery life.

1. Close the Oculus Desktop software
2. Open Settings > System > Power & Sleep
3. Click Additional Power Settings
4. Click Show Additional Plans
5. Select the option Ultimate Performance
    

It's possible the option may not exist. 

If the issue still persists, follow this link to our developer forums. 

[Fortytwoish]

Thanks for the response! I tried all given solutions, unfortunately the behavior didn't improve.

Here's an interesting snippet from the log file though:

But I'll try my luck in the developer forums!

[MetaQuestSupport]

Hey again, You are very welcome, we hope you find more information on our developer forums.

[Fortytwoish · Accepted solution]

If it helps someone else - I might have found a workaround! Maybe only the HEVC/H.265 encoder is broken?

You can force the use of H.264 through registry: reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Oculus\RemoteHeadset" /v "HEVC" /t REG_DWORD /d "0" /f

Or it's something entirely else in my signal chain and H.264 just works better 🙂 Still something to add to the list of possible troubleshooting steps.

[XilentRival]

Thank you! I've been having this same persistent stutter for months now when using link with my Quest Pro no matter what I tried... I think it was v49 that triggered it, and I've literally been looking into getting a separate headset just so I can use my sim racing rig again. Changing the encoder to h.264 worked flawlessly and now I'm not getting any more dropped encoder frames... You and are I definitely not the only people this has been affecting. I've come across multiple threads on Reddit over the past few months with people trying to figure out what's happening. 

My hardware specs are as follows, just in case someone at Meta cares to look into this and think it could be an OS or hardware bug:

• i9 13900k
• RTX 4090
• 64gb DDR5 5200mhz
• Windows 11

[ThatguyWizzer]

where can i force H.264?

[catalinking]

This doesn't help at all. You answered all the topics regarding stuttering with no solution.

Very disappointing.