Steam Link On Quest - The EASIEST Way To Play Steam VR Games But Is It The Best?

so valve just surprised us all by releasing steamlink for Quest it's a free official app that allows you to wirelessly stream your steam Library whether that be flat games or VR games directly to your quest 2 Quest 3 and Quest Pro now this is exciting for two reasons one we have a new official and free wireless solution to play our favorite steam VR games on Quest and two I feel like with the release of this app we're getting closer to valve dropping information on their upcoming headset code name Deckard fingers crossed so what I like about this new steamlink app is that it's streamlined it's super simple to use and I would go so far as to say it's the easiest way to play steam VR games on Quest right now but is it better than virtual desktop and airlink I hear you all ask well I'll go into the pros and cons of each app during this video first let me go over the setup now for the best experience with any Wireless VR streaming app you going to need a fast home network ideally a Wi-Fi 6 router that's connected directly to your PC using an ethernet cable personally I'm using the Asus xt8 Wi-Fi 6 router but there's plenty of Cheaper options available on the market that will work just as well the steam link app is completely free to download from the quest store and I've added a link to it in the description of this video before launching the app you need to ensure that remote play is enabled in your steam settings on your PC once enabled launch the steam link app in your headset where you'll be greeted with a one-time four-digit pairing code just enter that code into Steam on your PC and you're good to go it really is that simple I have a couple of steam link tips for you if you've ever used meta's airlink in the past ensure that steam VR is selected in the open XR settings menu if it's still set to Oculus this can cause issues with steam VR games not launching correctly with steamlink there are a couple of other things that you can tweak for a better experience with steamlink in the steamlink settings menu but the options are quite limited personally I found leaving the target bandwidth set to Auto work just fine for me but the encoded video size definitely needed tweaking the encoded video size setting is essentially the size of the sweet spot for fiated encoding by default it's set to around 1,088 pixels which is quite a aggressive meaning that even in the menu you can see the text gets blurry real quick outside of the central Sweet Spot which is particularly noticeable on Quest 3 due to having these big lovely pancake lenses I found that increasing this manually to around 1280 pixels was much better and I could barely notice the fiated encoding at all if you happen to have a quest Pro there are a couple of benefits here as it will automatically enable Dynamic fiated encoding which works with the the headset's eye tracking you can clearly see it working here while I move my eyes around the menu after I had turned the encoded video size right down also with Quest Pro you'll be able to stream face and ey tracking data to apps like VR chat which is pretty cool if you're into social VR if you want to play flat games using steam Link in your headset you can do this in this lovely screen environment which has some really nice mirrored lighting effects on the floor although you'll have to have your gam pad like an Xbox or Ps 5 controller connected directly to your PC you can't do this through the headset overall though I'm pretty impressed with steel mink for a free app it's incredibly easy to use but I will say it doesn't perform as well or as smoothly as virtual desktop which has been my go-to pcvr streaming app on Quest for years now now virtual desktop is a paid app it's 20 us5 British but it's well worth the asking price in my opinion it has low loads of settings that you can tweak for an optimal VR Gaming experience and it can launch both steam VR and Oculus Rift games directly from the game's menu it has presets for various graphics card configurations it has built-in synchronous space warp and Snapdragon game super resolution making your VR games look super sharp and run buttery smooth you can also use Virtual desktop to play remotely away from your home which you can't do with steamlink virtual desktop also supports pass through it has these beautiful environments that you can use including this one that has a high resolution cityscape just outside the window you can play flat games directly using the quest controllers as your inputs or you can pair an Xbox controller directly to the quest headset and use that instead and finally it has some awesome options for media playback so although steamlink is very cool I'm probably just going to continue to use Virtual desktop for now when it comes to the other option which is of course airlink I would say that this app is really only worth using if you're going to play PC VR games from your old Oculus PC Library games like the original asgard's wrath and lone Echo for example unfortunately the Oculus Rift PC platform has been long abandoned by meta and it's extremely rare to have a new game release on the rift platform and the software itself hasn't been updated for a while the only reason why I continue to use airlink is for recording purposes as you can use the excellent ocul mirror app to get a nice output for creating smooth gameplay video content which I happen to have used throughout this video because the default output using steam link looks like this it's just awful so that's steam link it's a good start and I do hope valve continues to improve the app over time having more options to tweak the stream settings would definitely be welcome I also hope we hear more from valve soon as rumors of their upcoming headset code named Deckard have been Flo around for years now mainly thanks to my buddy sadly it's Bradley and I feel like the poor man's going completely insane at this point my guess is that valve's new headset isn't going to be cheap so by them releasing this app on the quest store it kind of allows them to cover the low-end market with Quest and the high-end Market with their own headset pretty smart move but what makes me even more excited is the prospect of a new VR game coming from valve they launched Half-Life Alex with the index so I'm hoping they'll do something similar with the launch of decard but anyway let me know what you all think of steamlink in the comments Below have you tried it how do you think it compares to Virtual desktop and airlink is this getting you excited for valve's new headset I'd love to know in the comments down below leave a cheeky little like if you found the video useful make sure you subscribe for all my future VR content and as always I'll see you all on the next one cheers

Channel: Virtual Reality Oasis

Views: 253,735

Keywords: Steam Link Quest, Steam Link Quest 2, Steam Link Quest 3, Steam Link Quest Pro, Steam Link vs AirLink, Steam Link Vs Virtual Desktop, Steam Link VR, Steam Link Quest Review, Steam Link Quest Guide, Steam Link Setup Guide, How to setup Steam Link on Quest, Quest PCVR Guide, Play PCVR Games Wirelessly On Quest, Valve Steam Link VR, Valve Deckard, Best PCVR Games, Best PCVR Games 2024, Quest 3 PCVR Guide, Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 3 Games, VR, Virtual Reality

Id: U9S7fznoj7U

Length: 6min 56sec (416 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2023