Hey, how's it going?
Yah, things still aren't going well for the 7900XTX in the VR realm,
but while messing around with my AMD GPU's this past week I was pleasantly surprised
by what I discovered about AMD's Radeon 6000 GPU's. The easiest way to explain
all this is to just show you, but we need to start with a little bit of background first.
A couple months ago I ran some VR benchmarks on the 7900XTX,
if you haven't seen that video and would like to check it out, it's right here for ya. Anyway,
one of my complaints in that video had to do with the fact that the Oculus software was using h.264
to encode the video stream being sent to my Quest 2, so the visuals looked a little blurry compared
to how they look using an Nvidia GPU because AMD's h.264 encoder just isn't that great.
(fart noise)
If I switched the encoder to use h.265 though the graphics looked fantastic with the 7900XTX,
however the only way I knew to do that at the time was through Virtual Desktop which if you're not
familiar with it, is a $20 app that allows you to connect your Quest 2 to your PC wirelessly
similar to AirLink. Fast Forward to a few weeks ago and I learned that Nvidia GPU's actually
default to h.265 encoding when using AirLink, but AMD GPU's, even though they support h.265,
the Oculus software was continuing to default them to h.264. As there always is,
some very ingenuitive people found you can force AirLink to use h.265 with an AMD GPU
by changing a registry entry on your PC. I'm not sure who to give credit to for this because the
person that originally posted this info to Reddit deleted their original post,
but anyway they said you can copy and paste this command into your command prompt and
it will force AirLink to use h.265 so naturally I wanted to give it a try.
If you would also like to give it try I've placed a link to this post in the video description,
BUT before you run off and do that there's some more stuff you're gonna wanna know.
So I opened up my command prompt, copied and pasted this line into it and pressed
Enter. It told me the operation completed successfully, so I put on my headset and
fired up AirLink. Now I did all the original benchmarking for my 7900XTX VR review video
using a Link cable to get the best possible performance, so I didn't mess with AirLink all
that much while making that video. This time around though, as soon as AirLink launched,
I noticed that not only did my visuals NOT look as good as I was expecting them to, but
on the right side of my field of view it looked like things were being squeezed in like this.
I tried capturing footage directly to the headset in hopes of being able to show you
guys what this looks like, but for whatever reason it doesn't capture. I know I'm not the
only one to experience this though because searching online for a fix I came across a
number of people experiencing the same problem with the 7900XTX and the Quest 2. It seems this
is a problem Oculus or Meta... is aware of but it's not exactly high on their priority
list of bugs to fix right now. Anyway, if you're experiencing it you know what it looks like. This
then sent me down a completely different rabbit hole trying to find a fix for it,
but I'll come back to that, because I wanna finish this encoding stuff first.
Since AirLink was giving me this weird right side peripheral squeezing effect I decided to switch
to using a Link cable and see if this forcing h.265 thing actually works. I fired up Quest Link
aaaaannnnndddd... this is what I got. Not exactly what I was expecting. To see if it was a problem
that only existed in the Rift interface I launched a game, but as you can clearly see this tearing
and stuttering did not go away. If I held really still it wasn't as bad, but as soon as I moved my
head or anything it was a completely unplayable mess. I tried restarting the Oculus app and even
restarting my PC but the only thing that fixed it was to copy and paste this other command from that
same Reddit post which sets the encoder option back to automatic and defaults us back to h.264.
It's now been 5 months since the 7900xtx launched and to this day if you look at the
notes on AMD's drivers they acknowledge the VR performance of their 7000 series
GPU's still needs some work. The fact that Virtual Desktop works well using
h.265 encoding though has me thinking that it's not all AMD's fault here. Oculus needs
to get their crap together too. With things once again not going great for the 7900xtx
I wondered what about other AMD GPU's? Do they still default to h.264? I just so happen to
have three different Radeon 6000 series GPU's on hand so I figured I would give them a try.
I first popped in the 6700XT and fired up AirLink and lo and behold, it defaulted to h.265!
YAH!!!
I didn't even have to force it. For fully scientific reason and not just to play
games and have fun, I tested it out with a few different games and they all ran smooth
and looked super sharp and crisp. I then tried the 6650XT and the 6950XT and got
the same result. AirLink now defaults to h.265 encoding for AMD 6000 series GPU's,
as it should. Now whether this is due to an Oculus update within the past few months or
has something to do with me forcing h.265 and then setting it back to default, I'm not entirely sure,
but what I do know is that those GPU's now deliver just as good looking visuals as my Nvidia GPU's.
As for Radeon 5000 GPU's, I don't have any of those to test with,
so I don't know if this extends to them as well, but if you have one and use AirLink
with it, let me know in the comments which encoder it defaults to, I'd love to know.
You can find out which codec AirLink is using through the Oculus Debug Tool. If
you've never used it before, to load up the Oculus Debug Tool you first wanna click on
the folder icon on your Windows task bar. Go to your C:// drive, then to Program Files,
Oculus, Support, Oculus-diagnostics and then double click on OculusDebugTool.
Toward the bottom of the Window you'll see Visible HUD. Click on where it says None,
and from the drop down select Performance. Now click on this little plus sign next to
where it says Performance HUD here and where it says Performance Summary we want to open
that drop down and select Oculus Link. Now when you launch AirLink you'll see the HUD like I'm
showing here and next to where it says Encoding it will tell you if you're using h.264 or h.265.
Circling back to the 7900xtx and the right side squeezed field of view issue... On the
Oculus forums I found a post from this guy, I'm not even going to try pronouncing that. Anyway,
he found a way to eliminate this squeezing effect. What you do is first open Task Manager, you then
scroll down until you find the Oculus Processes. You then want to end each of these tasks.
Once they're all closed you want to click on the Windows Explorer folder icon on your taskbar,
go to your C:// drive, then to users, then to your profile name, then app data and finally
Roaming. If you don't see the app data folder you'll need to click on View at the top of
the window and then tick this box for hidden items. You should then see AppData and inside
of it open the Roaming folder. You now want to select your Oculus folder here and delete it.
Don't worry there aren't any saved game files or anything here so we're not deleting anything of
great importance and when we start up the Oculus app again this entire folder will be regenerated.
With that done we can start up the Oculus app again and you'll be prompted to log in to your
Oculus account. You'll then need to go through the whole process of logging in to your account and
pairing your headset with your PC again but once you get that all finished you can launch AirLink
and at this point the squeezing on the right side should be gone. The bad news about this is,
this fix is only temporary. According to the guy who made the forum post and I have confirmed this,
it only works for a total of two restarts of the Oculus app. He did find a way though where
you don't have to log in to your account and pair your headset over and over again,
so here's what you're going to need to do next if you're wanting to use your 7900XTX
with AirLink and want to get rid of that weird right side squeezing thing.
We now need to go back to our PC to that Oculus folder we deleted earlier. So C://, users,
your name, appdata, roaming and then Oculus. From here we now need to go into the sessions folder
and then this one that's just a long string of numbers and we want to copy these two files here,
data.sqlite and data.sqlite-wal. You'll then want to create a new folder here,
I'm just going to call mine temp and then paste these files into this folder.
Our forum guy that discovered this calls these our magic files. Sadly, until Oculus fixes this
squeezing bug you're going to need to copy these files into the long string of numbers folder
every time before starting up the Oculus app to play PCVR. Yes I know, it's a pain to have to do
this every time you want to play something, but it's much better than deleting the whole Oculus
folder and having log in to your account and pair your headset over and over again. Also I should
mention when pasting your magic files in you'll want to delete all the bad data.sqlite files
before pasting the magic ones in. You may have a third data.sqlite-shm file in addition to the
other two and you'll want to make sure to delete that one also. In my experience trying this,
it did eliminate the squeezing problem but it also defaults the 7900XTX to h.264 encoding. I
tried forcing h.265 and then doing all of this but with h.265 encoding enabled this whole deleting
the Oculus folder fix did not work. It only worked if I allowed it to default to h.264.
Going into this I had hoped enough time had gone by since my review of the 7900XTX that
things would be working better, sadly as of the making of this video the 7900XTX
is still kneecapped when it comes to playing VR with a Quest 2. And who
knows when AMD and Oculus will finally get this stuff patched up and working properly.
Just my luck though, now that I've spent all this time making this video it'll all be fixed
in the next update and this video will be instantly obsolete. Such is life I guess.
The 6000 series defaulting to h.265 now is really exciting though. Yah,
they aren't the latest and greatest GPU's on the market, but they do all perform really well and
when compared to the new stuff, are a much better value when it comes to price to performance and
you can see how their performance stacks up against one another in this playlist here.