Until now Virtual Desktop has been the defacto standard for
wireless PC VR gaming on your Oculus Quest headset.
However, Oculus have now released Air Link. Their own
official way of getting wireless PC VR gaming on your headset.
So which is best? Virtual Desktop? The tried and tested provider,
or Oculus themselves? The new kids on the block in this area.
Welcome to My Tech Gear...Let’s find out!
Between Virtual Desktop and Air Link, what are their pro’s and con’s? How do
each of them play? Is one of them better than the other, or are they both rubbish?
Spoiler alert on that one, I play wireless PC VR gaming, and it’s not rubbish!
And if you think the video isn’t rubbish either then please don’t forget to like and share it,
and if you’re not subscribed then consider that button down below,
and that notification bell so you’re notified about new videos as and when I post them. It
really helps me grow this channel so that I can keep making videos like this, for you! Thanks!
So how easy are each of these to set up? Well, it was to be Air Link that wins in the ease of
setup department, which isn’t really a surprise as Oculus have baked it into the firmware of
the Quest headset itself (you will need v28 of the firmware, or higher, in order to get this).
You literally only have to turn on a toggle in the Beta settings in the Oculus App on your PC
and in the Experimental Features section of the Settings options
on your Quest headset and you’re pretty much done.
For Virtual Desktop on the other hand you do have to download an additional app on your headset,
and also your PC. It doesn’t take long, but it is an additional step or two.
If you want to know how to get both Virtual Desktop and Air Link set up, then be sure to check
out my easy how-to guides for each of them. I’ll place links to them in the description down below.
In order to get the best experience and performance possible, for both Air Link and
Virtual Desktop, you will need a good 5GHz Wifi router (preferably an AX or Wifi 6 one), with your
PC connected via an ethernet cable to your router rather than over wifi, and preferably nothing else
operating on the Wifi network either. You should also have a VR capable PC. If you’re not sure
what spec PC you need then both my Virtual Desktop setup guide that I mentioned earlier,
and the Steam VR set up guide I’ve also done go through those specs.
Links to those videos are in the description below.
From a configuration perspective, there is some basic configuration available with Air
Link which allows you to change the bitrate of the data stream from the PC to your Quest.
When in the Rift homescreen on your Quest you can access Air Links configuration using the
button on the far left of your main menu. You can change the max variable bit rate, or change
it to a constant bit rate, whichever gives you the most stable connection for your network.
Remember that the lower the setting, the less space it will take up on your network.
That will make it more accommodating to lower spec networks, but the knock on effect of that
is that it will also lower the picture quality. I’d recommend sticking with the default settings,
and only changing them if you need to.
Virtual Desktop on the other hand has a multitude of configuration options for you to
tweak so that you can get the best compromise of performance vs picture quality for your network.
It’s not just bitrate settings that you can change here. You can even change the codec that’s
used to stream the game, amongst a host of other settings. I did a ‘best settings’ video on this
a while ago if you’d like to go check that out. I’ll place a link in the description down below.
It’s this configurability that really gives Virtual Desktop the edge over Air Link here
as you can change configurations to match a less than ideal network,
so it’s Virtual Desktop that’s going to be more useful to more people here.
Both setup and configurability matter for squat though if they are complete pants to play on.
So, here I’ve got some game play from Half-Life Alyx so you can see
the comparison between Air Link and Virtual Desktop side-by-side.
Set-up wise, I’ve got both set to a max variable bit-rate of 100mbps,
so you can see not only their picture quality, but also how each of them handle a variable bit rate.
The frame rate is set to 90fps, with the default render resolutions. I deliberately
didn’t set the frame rate to 120fps, which is possible with both Virtual Desktop and Air Link,
because in order to get those frame-rates, the resolution of the image has to be lowered.
90fps was, for me, a good compromise between resolution and refresh rate.
And for the PC spec, I’m running this on a PC using an MSI 3060 Ti graphics card.
Please bare in mind that what you see
on the Quest headset is actually better than what you’re seeing on screen at the moment,
this is mainly due to the Quest headset heavily compressing gameplay when it records it,
but it is a good indicator of what you’ll be presented with on your headset when playing.
As you can see, both of them did well,
and it is actually very hard to tell the difference between the two.
For me, I found the picture quality coming from Virtual Desktop to pop
slightly better, with better colours and contrast, but it’s a close call.
I had a couple of instances of video stutter on the Air Link too,
but it wasn’t anything major. Both were also responsive to my actions and I didn’t perceive
any delay between pressing the trigger, and any events on screen. However, I wouldn’t recommend
fast motion games like Beat Saber on Expert+ mode as the wireless latency is just going to
be too much on either of them. For everything else though, it’s more than enough for what you need.
Air Link is free as it’s baked into the firmware of the Quest headset
and the Oculus App on the PC, whereas for Virtual Desktop, the Quest app is $20,
or about £15. So, if cost is your only concern, Air Link wins.
So, which should you use?
Nothing beats free, if it’s good enough! And here, Air Link more than fits the bill,
so I’d recommend starting off with that. It is the easiest, free option for wireless PC VR gaming,
And for a product that Oculus are labelling as an experimental feature, it performs incredibly well,
just bear in mind that you could get issues with it depending on the game and your set up.
Here's a couple of issues that I encountered...Don’t do anything else on your
network when you’re playing PC VR games (and this is true for both Air Link and Virtual Desktop).
PC VR takes up ALOT of your network bandwidth, so doing anything else on your network,
like streaming Netflix at the same time, can have a significant impact on performance.
Mesh Networks. Air Link has a real problem with this and was getting quite a stuttery
playback when used, and it’s a known issue that Oculus mentions on their support pages.
I fixed that by disabling the ‘mesh roaming’ feature on my mesh network
and locking the Quest to the main mesh node. Once I did that, it was all good.
So, hopefully that’s a helpful tip to people who might be in a similar situation.
If after trying various bitrate and frame rate options on Air Link, you are still having issues
with performance, then try Virtual Desktop. It is a more mature product, and has more configuration
options than Air Link. It therefore allows you to tweak your performance and picture quality
to get that perfect balance for you. At only $20 it’s not exactly going to break the bank either.
It will be really interesting to see how quickly Oculus can mature the Air Link product
and offer feature parity with Virtual Desktop. I can easily see Virtual Desktop being superseded
once Air Link matures, just due to how easy it is to use!
Which is a shame as Virtual Desktop has been providing a great service to Questers for years
and I really think that Guy Godin, the creator of Virtual Desktop, really deserves something for his
efforts. Simply being overrun by Oculus just seems unfair, especially as Oculus, until recently,
spent so long actively blocking the wireless PC VR functionality of Virtual Desktop
such that you had to sideload a patch from Sidequest in order to get it to work.
Thanks for watching. I do hope this has helped
you decide whether you want to give Virtual Desktop, or Air Link a go.
If you have enjoyed the video, please don’t forget to like and share it,
consider subscribing if you’re not, and as always…
See you in the next one!