When you look up the requirements for using Air Link with the Quest 2, officially Oculus
recommends connecting your PC to your router using an Ethernet cable.
But of course there are people out there who's PC is far enough away from their router that
this may be a difficult requirement to fulfill and they're wondering whether or not they
can just connect their PC or their laptop for that matter to their home WiFi and play
PCVR games on their Quest 2 fully wirelessly.
Well for those of you in this situation I decided to give it a try and see what happens.
I first wanted to find out if using a network cable was some kind of hard requirement; meaning
does Oculus have some way of detecting in their software whether you're PC is connected
to your network with a network cable or not;
so I fired up my laptop and tried launching Air Link on the Quest 2 and connecting to
my laptop, aaaannnnddd...
it worked.
I didn't load up a game or anything but just loaded into the Oculus PC interface because
my laptop only has a GTX 1050ti in it.
Going into this I was expecting things to be stuttering and stuff a fair amount because
the 1050ti isn't exactly a GPU I think anyone would recommend for VR and also due to the
fact that my laptop was wirelessly connecting to my home network.
Surprisingly though it wasn't bad.
It wasn't fantastic but it wasn't bad.
This little experiment suggested to me that it IS possible to ditch the network cable
and still use Air Link but now I needed to try it with my much more VR capable gaming
PC, so I jumped on Amazon and ordered this Asus wireless network adapter.
I recently upgraded our router to one with WiFi 6 so in order to get the best results
I made sure the WiFi adapter I used for this experiment was also WiFi 6.
I figure since WiFi 6 is the fastest home WiFi standard currently available if this
setup doesn't give us acceptable performance with Air Link then nothing else will either.
Once I'd received my new WiFi adapter and got it installed in my PC, it was time to
fire up Air Link and see just what it was like.
I first loaded into the Oculus PC interface and everything looked good.
At this point I couldn't really tell much of a difference between my PC being connected
with WiFi versus being connected with an Ethernet cable.
So, so far so good.
I then started up Steam VR and loaded up a game of Half Life Alyx.
You can't see it in the video capture here but this is where things took a turn for the
worse.
Game play was a little bit choppy...
I mean it wasn't terrible but there was some micro-stuttering or something going on which
wasn't exactly great.
And the graphics looked muddy and blurry.
Let me explain something real quick.
Since upgrading our router to WiFi 6 the streaming bitrate for Air Link has been MUCH better
than when I was using WiFi 5.
When using WiFi 5 game play was always fine but the graphics would often look blurry and
the textures really muddy but after upgrading our router to one with WiFi 6 this problem
was pretty much eliminated thanks to the faster speed of WiFi 6.
Graphics consistently look much, much sharper and clearer with WiFi 6.
Almost as good as using a link cable.
Connecting my PC to my network wirelessly using the WiFi 6 adapter though took things
back to how they looked when I was using WiFi 5.
At times things looked great and at other times they did not.
Just real quick for those that don't know WiFi 5 is also called wireless AC and WiFi
6 is wireless AX.
Overall the game was playable...ish but it wasn't exactly what I would call an ideal
experience.
I tried capturing game play directly to the Quest 2 to see if I could capture this but
as you can tell it didn't really work.
What you're seeing now is my best attempt to simulate what it looks like by lowering
the Quest 2's capture bitrate.
I want to make it clear that this is not exactly what I saw in the headset.
This is just my best attempt to reproduce what I saw to give you an idea of what I mean
when I say the graphics looked blurry or a bit muddy.
As for the slight choppiness I experienced, sadly that didn't capture and there's not
really an easy way I know of to replicate it with my video editing software or otherwise,
so sorry about that.
As soon as I switched back to using an Ethernet cable to connect my PC to our router everything
improved dramatically looking pretty much like what you're seeing now; assuming you're
watching this in HD of course.
If you're watching it in 480p or something then yah, it's still going to look like garbage.
So to sum things up, YES you can use Air Link without connecting your PC to your router
with an Ethernet cable.
I say this however with a big ole asterisk next to it though.
In this video I was using a WiFi 6 router and a WiFi 6 wireless adapter in my PC so
this is pretty much a best case scenario.
If your router is WiFi 5 and the wireless adapter in your laptop or PC is also WiFi
5 then I think it's safe to say that performance is going to be worse than what I experienced
in my little experiment here.
In the end I'm in full agreement with Oculus.
For the best experience possible when using Air Link you want to connect your PC to your
wireless AC or in my opinion preferably wireless AX router using an Ethernet cable.