Oculus Link is what you need to play PC VR games like Half-Life: Alyx or Asgard’s Wrath
with your Oculus Quest 2.
This is an easy guide for setting it up and tips on improving graphics quality since the
default image is quite compressed!
Good day everyone!
Cas here, and welcome to another VR Tech Tips video!
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And now, join me beyond reality.
Let me start with a short introduction.
What is Oculus Link exactly and who is it for?
Oculus Link is the software update that comes included with your Oculus Quest headset.
By connecting your Quest 2 with a compatible USB cable to a gaming PC, you can play PC
VR games.
You’re essentially converting your standalone VR headset into a cabled PC VR headset, like
a Valve Index.
But yes, this does mean you need a gaming PC or laptop to run the games on.
These are the recommended specifications for Oculus Link.
There is also a list of supported CPU and GPU’s.
Please do check if your hardware is supported before trying this out so you don’t waste
any time.
There is also a free app available on Steam to check if your PC is VR ready.
Right now, Oculus Link is still in beta so it’s not the most reliable software yet,
it can be buggy, but most of the time it works well enough.
Plus, Oculus Link should also move out of beta soon, and hopefully lots of bugs will
be fixed then.
As for the cable, you need a compatible USB 3 cable.
If you have a USB-C port, I recommend using the official Oculus Link cable.
If you want to use a USB-A port on your computer, you can try out the Anker Powerline cable.
You can extend it with an active extension cable like this one.
I’ll link all cables below in the description.
But any cable with the USB 3.1 gen 2 or higher standard should work well.
Be careful about using cheap cables you find online as a lot of them can cause problems
as you need a high quality cable that can handle the necessary bandwidth to transfer
games to your headset.
If you find that your cables aren’t working, then try out different USB ports on your computer,
most likely the USB ports at the back of your computer work better.
This is because the USB port you use also needs to support the right speed.
To see what ports you have, you need to check your motherboard’s documentation, which
you can usually find from the official website.
This is mine, for example.
Now you know this!
Let’s get into how to get it setup, this is easiest part actually, which is really
nice.
You should now have you Quest 2 at hand, cable ready too.
Now, on your PC, go to the oculus.com/setup.
Scroll to Oculus Link and click “Download Software”.
Then find the downloaded file, double-click it to install the software.
Go through the steps until you’re finished.
Now, start the Oculus Home software.
Go to Devices.
Click “Add headset” here.
Plugin your Quest 2 with your USB cable to your PC.
Now go through the steps.
The Oculus software also comes with a USB cable tester; if your cable or port isn’t
sufficient, it’ll let you know.
Once done, you should see your headset now.
If you click on it, you can see it’s connected, this means you can use Oculus Link.
To enter Link, you have to put on your headset with the cable connected.
You might get the message to allow access to data first, with your controllers, click
‘Allow’ here.
You should also get a pop-up window asking to enable Oculus Link.
You can enter straight away by clicking enable.
If you don’t want this pop-up to show up every time you connect a cable, you can also
click ‘Don’t show this again’ and then, when you connect a cable, you will get the
option to enter Oculus Link from the ‘Quick Actions’ menu instead of a pop-up.
The Rift version of Oculus Home should now show up!
And you’re ready to go!
Download and install games from here.
You can also download SteamVR and start playing games from Steam.
In the next section of this video, we’ll dive into the ways to increase quality.
So this is for those interested in a bit of a techy explanation, if not timestamps are
below and if you use that, at least leave me a like, okay, on this video? :P
Right now, Oculus Link has a bandwidth cap at 150Mbps.
This is the maximum video bitrate that’s transferred through the cable.
This means that the graphics you see in Oculus Link games may look compressed and by far
not as good looking as playing with a regular VR headset.
But 150Mbps is not a lot considering how much more a USB 3 cable can handle.
This was because the Quest 1 processor was not able to decode at higher bitrates.
The Quest 2 Snapdragon XR2 chip can handle higher bitrates, so Oculus has removed this
cap now.
Right now, this setting is a bit hidden and in beta as well.
So settings these will get easier once everything moves out of beta later this year, but I wanted
to show you how to increase it -now- as it makes such a difference.
First, for this, you need to opt-in to the beta version of the Oculus Home software.
Open Oculus Home again and check what version you are running first by going to ‘Settings’
> ‘General’ and scrolling down.
If you have a version below v23, then you have to opt-in to the beta.
I’m asking you to check your version first as if you watch this video later, you might
already have version 23, and then you don’t need to opt-in to the beta.
So if you have version 23 or up, you can skip this step.
If not, let’s move on.
Go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Beta’.
Toggle ‘Public Test Channel’ on.
Confirm it & Your Oculus software will download the new version.
Wait until it’s finished; you should get a pop-up asking to update the software.
Confirm it to install the new version.
Once done, confirm that you have the correct version by going to ‘Settings’ > ‘General’
again and scroll down.
If you’re on v23 or up, you’re good to go.
Now make sure you go to ‘Devices’, click on your connected Oculus Quest 2 headset,
and make sure you check ‘Prioritize Quality’ setting here.
Here, you can choose other settings as well, in case you bump into performance issues.
Once you set this, the software will restart.
We need to do one more thing to make everything look nice!
You will need the Oculus Debug Tool, which comes with your Oculus software.
To get there, you need to navigate to your Oculus install folder.
I installed the Oculus software in the default folder, so for me it’s in My PC > the C
Drive > Program Files > Oculus > Support.
Find oculus-diagnostics, go in that folder and here’s the Oculus Debug Tool!
To access this more easily later, I recommend right-clicking it and pinning it to your Start
Menu or to your Task Bar if that’s your preference.
Double-click to open it, and you’ll find the settings you need here!
The three main settings you need are: - ‘Encode Bitrate’ - this is to increase
the cap that we talked about earlier - ‘Encode Resolution Width’ - this is
to increase the max eye buffer resolution in the width.
Whatever you set here, it’ll automatically adjust the eye buffer height to keep the aspect
ratio - And ‘Pixels Per Display’ is also nice
as it can make everything look a bit sharper.
It’s supersampling.
But here you do need to be careful as if you set everything too high, your CPU might not
be able to handle it.
I recommend a maximum of 1.6, but just start small and test what works for your system.
For the bitrate, you can set this to max 500 Mbps for now and the resolution can be set
to max 4000.
These settings of 3664 here, with the Pixels Per Display to 1.2, and Bitrate to 500, looks
great on a RTX 2080 TI.
Once set, it should automatically show in your headset.
Make sure you do have Link on, of course.
And press enter once you set these numbers.
And that’s it!
If you’re having some trouble, you can also click here at ‘File’ > ‘Restart As Administrator’.
That should work out any issues.
But if you’re unsure if the Debug tool is working at all, then you can set the max bitrate
to 10.
And if everything turns very ugly, then you know it works.
So you can follow my settings or play around with it yourself!
A little note here, at the time of making this video, a bug prevents the ‘Encode Resolution
Width’ to go higher than the default of 2356.
But this is still higher than the previous 2064 :) You might be wondering how I checked
that, well to check what resolution your headset is rendering in, you can use ‘OVRMetrics’
that you can install via the Oculus Developer Hub, I’m not going to go too in-depth on
how to check that here, but I’ll link the documentation on this below if you’re interested.
We need to wait until Oculus fixes this, but even only using the two other options already
improves the quality much more!
It’s hard to notice any compression now and it comes really close to regular PC VR.
I’ve been waiting for this for so long.
So I’m happy!
Then to exit Oculus Link, you can open the Oculus Menu and click this button at the far
left.
You can leave Oculus Link here to go back to the Quest Home environment.
Let me know in the comments if you will try this out, what you think of it and what settings
you are using!
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As always, VR on!