Meta Quest 2: PC VR streaming with Air Link

With Air Link, you can stream PC VR games to the Quest 2 over your wifi network. How high is the latency?

The following measurements and test impressions were kindly provided by our Unreal Engine expert Robin Hasenbach.

What Air Link is and what you have to consider when setting up the wireless data transfer can be read in detail in our PC VR streaming guide. There you will also find similarities, differences, and advantages and disadvantages of the paid alternative Virtual Desktop.

We measured the Air Link performance in three test environments:

We streamed to a Meta Quest 2 with 64 gigabytes of storage. General test impressions follow at the end of the article.

Content

System configuration:

Network:

We came up with the following readings and a latency of 54.8 milliseconds.

System configuration:

Network:

We came up with the following readings and a latency of 59.1 milliseconds.

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System configuration:

Network:

We came up with the following readings and latency of 79.9 milliseconds.

We tested Air Link with the following games:

Singleplayer:

Multiplayer:

The latency is not noticeable as long as you have access to a good network. The hotspot solution (test environment C) is possible, but not advisable because the latency is much higher in direct comparison. It is better to use a separate Wi-Fi access point and connect it to the PC as short as possible (test environment B). High latencies were caused by long cable routes and redirections (test environment A).

Further, the above titles can be played well as usual, and there are no differences in image quality between the wired solution Oculus Link and the native cable connection of the Oculus Rift S at first. Only in Beat Saber does Air Link become noticeable in terms of latency from the Expert level onwards.

Air Link is perfectly sufficient for non-competitive titles or slower games, so you can safely do without the Link cable in most cases in the future. For the best experience, we suggest setting the bitrate to Dynamic and 200 Mbit per second. Very high latencies can occur with a fixed bitrate, while image artifacts are occasionally visible with a low dynamic bitrate.

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