White horizontal stripe across screen while using link

[Panzer_mk2]

Headset seems to work fine stand-alone.  I use the headset with IRacing, and often (not always) get a translucent horizontal stripe across the screen after about 15 minutes or so.  It doesn't feel like the headset is overheating.  This doesn't show up on the screen mirror on PC, or if I "mirror" with the debug tool.  Is this likely a failing display or is there somewhere else I should look?

[fzecchin]

First Pokebert, so many thanks to you !

I bought a Quest pro at the beginning of the week (just when you published the trick I think) and was desperate because the lower quarter of the screens of the headset were becoming brighter and brighter after a few seconds in link mode.

The support was useless and they ended telling me that as I had a RTX 4090 graphic card and this card was not listed as compatible with the headset they could do nothing. Of course, I tried with a RTX 3070 which is in the list of compatible cards and the problem was the same.

Then I found your post and of course it solved the problem.

However, I suspected that the problem only started when I installed Oculus Tray Tools, so I enterely uninstalled OTT, I uninstalled the Oculus application, and more important I removed from the registry every item that has Oculus in it (because I removed the Oculus application and reinstalled it before and this didn't do the trick).

And miracle : when I reinstalled the Oculus application it created the numSlices item automatically with a value of 3 (I can't get higher as the value 4 brings back the bright lower part).

Conclusion : Meta did things well out of the box for the Quest pro (do this mean they know the problem and its fix ???) and OTT removes the numSlices item.

Regards

Franck

[Gromit57]

The registry location shown does not work with my system. I noticed BitrateMpbs wasn't set to the value in ODT so searched the registry for that entry. It's located here on my system - 

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-3531734121-3087549625-875534212-1001\SOFTWARE\Oculus\RemoteHeadset

Having added your entry to that location, the number of slices is now showing as one in ODT performance hud. Just thought this might be useful in case others are getting the same issue.

[tanubon]

Almost meaningless, but we can use H265 on wired Link (H264) if we use numslices=1 without image corrapse. But latency is super **** unplayable if we use more than 200Mbps unlike Air Link (H265).

[benji94]

Don't know if anyone esle has noticed but we are fast approaching the milestone of 1000 replies to this topic.  What an accomplishment!  To celebrate this remarkable event I propose a celebratory party at my place.  All are invited.  Included in the celebration will be a ceremony to induct Pokebert into the Meta Forums Hall of Fame (regardless of what Meta thinks) and also bestow upon him Knighthood into the Exalted Order of the Enigmas, Riddles, and Conundrum Solvers.

[Pokebert]

So, with strangely particular timing, NVIDIA JUST updated their encoder to allow 5 separate streams instead of 3: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/nvidia-quietly-boosts-the-video-encoding-capabilities-of-gef...

Can anyone who reliably got the white bar issue, update their GeForce drivers to the latest issue (531.41, released March 23rd) and remove my driver workaround/fix and see if the driver updates fix the encoding issues? To remove it, all you need to do is use this command:

reg delete "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Oculus\RemoteHeadset" /v "numSlices"

[Pokebert]

UPDATE: After using standard/default 5 slices and confirming I was updated to driver 531.41 from 3/23, I still reproduced the white bar issue after about 5 minutes of playtime. 
Can confirm, on my end at least, that driver encoder updates do not fix the white bar issue. This is using an RTX 3070. 

[George_T93]

Hi Pokebert, and thank you for all your hard work. Running 531.41 here with an RTX 3070. The issue has only affected Dirt Rally 2.0 on my system. With 4 slices, the white bar did not return while in a race, but did return in the menu screens between races. With 3 slices I was able to play for approximately an hour tonight without the bar appearing at all before I had to stop playing for the evening. I will continue testing, but this is the first time since I've owned my headset that I've been able to play Dirt Rally 2.0 without the bar appearing at all! Fantastic work, and thank you for figuring this out.

[AdrianRode]

For me numSlices set to 1 solves white stripe issue with RTX3080 and MSFS (the newest NVIDIA driver). Tried 2, 3 and 4 slices but it didn't work. With 1 slice I haven't noticed any performance drop 🤩

[benji94]

It has been interesting to me, and I think telling, that Dirt Rally 2.0 has the most reports of experiencing the white line issue.  Microsoft Flight Sim is a close second and other racing simulation games also have the issue above other less graphics intensive apps.  It hints at there being an interplay between the game app settings, Oculus settings (ODT), Nvidia settings, and hardware (GPU) capabilities.  If not all are in sync the Nvidia encoder fails to deliver a clean compressed image for some yet to be determined reason.  Reducing the number of slices appears to give the h.264 encoder some extra time (since reducing the number of slices increases latency) it needs to compress each frame error free.  I'm totally speculating here, but it is possible I think that there isn't actually a problem with the h.264 encoder at all...maybe its just being pushed past its limit to keep up due to the various settings established by the end user in an effort to get the best possible image displayed in the headset.

As far as Dirt Rally 2.0...here are a couple of links I found discussing its graphics needs:

Dirt Rally 2.0 Performance Breakdown And Most Important Graphics Options (game-debate.com)

and

Dirt Rally 2.0 System Requirements | Can I Run Dirt Rally 2 PC requirements (game-debate.com)

[EC-EIP]

Thanks for your solution to this problem!!, really aprecciated!! Congratulations!!