Steam Link & Steam VR Settings Guide - Latency Vs Image Quality

[Music] with steam link now been capable of being used to pcvr I thought now was the perfect time to complete a settings guide for both steam VR and steam link with a focus on comparing settings that impact on latency and picture Clarity I won't cover all of the settings but we'll cover the majority of the ones you need for day-to-day use to get steam link working you will need to ensure you have Steam and steam VR installed on your PC and steam link installed on your met VR headset it isn't yet available on other headsets but the principles will likely be the same if it ever is as usual you'll need to ensure your headset is connected to your router with a 5 GHz band of Wi-Fi 5 or 6 or 6 GHz band of Wi-Fi 6A and your PC needs to be connected to your rout with an ethernet cable for the best results once steam link is installed on your VR headset open the app and it will prompt you to enter four-digit code into Steam on your PC once you've completed this in your headset it will then bring up the PC that it detects on your network and if it is the right one click connect the steam VR environment will then be loaded in your headset and in the menu at the very bottom left you will see an icon that looks like a pair of glasses that is for the VR settings and once selected you should see options down the left hand side for going from General to steam link if we look at the steam link options first the setting at the top is Target bandwidth this sets how much data is transferred per second if you leave it in Auto then your PC will decide on a suitable data transfer rate for your connection if you slep manual then you'll be able to set the data transfer rate up to 350 mbits per second the higher this setting the more data that gets passed through and the less compression that takes place on the images being past your headset this means that a higher bandwidth will have a better picture quality and will have less compression artifacts which is good as compression artifacts can make an image look fuzzy or more pixelated this will be less noticeable in Rim scale games like halflife Alex and more notable in racing or flight Sims the higher the bandwidth though the higher the latency will be so if you are playing a game like beat saber or competitive online shooters or racing where you may need a fast reaction time then you may want to keep the target bandwidth quite low a good level for trying to keep latency low is probably around 75 megabits per second I find that when Sim racing offline I prefer image quality so set this to high at the expense of latency the next setting which is encoded video size again can be left in aut automatic for your PC to decide or in manual the encoded video size is how many pixels are being sent across by your PC in the data stream if you set this to manual then you can set this up to 1,344 pixels now this is a particularly odd number as it is very low and from my testing the image qualtity stays high so I'm not exactly sure how it is doing this however the higher the number the greater the demand on your PC and the better the image quality will be whilst the higher the latency will also be so if you prefer image quality set it to 1344 or test at lower settings to get the balance of latency against image quality the encryption option is exactly what it sounds like and details whether you want the data to be encrypted on your network there is also an option to show debug graph on your PC's desktop you'll be able to see a graph displaying your latency and you'll be able to see your frames per second to help monitor this whilst gaming if you expand this window on your PC and then select your desktop in Steam VR then you can pin this to your controller so you can monitor it live you can also increase the size of the window if needed as it is quite difficult to see the stats otherwise the next settings to be aware of are under the video tab here you can set what refresh rate you would like and this can be changed even whilst in a game without having to restart it to take effect the lower you set the refresh rate the less demand there is on your PC with 120 FPS being around 66% more demanding on your CPU and GPU to run if you set your your frame rate at say 72 HZ then your target bandwidth that we set before will be shared across the 72 frames per second allowing for a better quality than when the data is shared across a frame rate such as 90 or 120 frames the refresh rate also determines how long your PC has to prepare each frame or image which is called frame time so at 72 HZ your PC has 13.8 milliseconds to prepare each image whilst at 120 HZ it only has 8.3 milliseconds if your PC can't prepare the image within this time then you're likely to experience poor VR performance with frames being delayed or missed if your PC isn't preparing them quick enough then you'll need to turn down the resolution in Steam VR or turn down the graphical settings in your game the higher your refresh rate as long as your system is running out that refresh rate without any issues the lower your latency will be this takes us nicely into the next setting render resolution here you can set it to Auto and your PC will decide what resolution the image is rendered at before it is encoded or you can set it to custom and decide what resolution you want the image to be rendered at before it is encoded to the encoded video size that we discussed earlier the higher the resolution you set the better the image quality will be the more demanding it will be on your PC and the higher the latency will be for me with an RTX 4090 the maximum my PC will seem to run in a game like project c 2 that 72 HZ is around 3100x 3100 pixels per IE it will will differ per game so I recommend setting it to custom at 100% here then go to per application video settings where you can set the resolution specific to each game Advanced super sample filtering is a bit of a controversial setting as when it is on it uses more pixels to determine the final image and can make an image softer apparently reducing the Shimmer effect caused by aliasing however it can in the process remove some details in my testing it didn't have any noticeable impact on latency so it is a choice of whether you want to see all the details by having it on but potentially seeing more aliasing or having a smoother image with it off with less shimmering and slightly less Clarity or detail the overlay render quality is the quality of the steam VR dashboard and menus it won't impact on your gaming latency image quality or frame rate unless you have the desktop pinned or visible in your gaming session to monitor all of these settings in game I use fpsvr with this tool you can monitor your CPU and GPU us usage your frame times and your refresh rate to ensure your system is managing to provide the frame rate at your chosen settings you might have noticed that with steam link there isn't a setting for motion smoothing which is also known as reprojection or synchronous space warp and is usually found on the video page and settings this means that with steam link for the moment it doesn't allow you to select whether you have it on or off motion smoothing can reduce the load significantly on your system by your PC generating half of the frames and with the other half of the frames being calc Cal ated and extrapolated from the frames being generated but when in use motion smoothing can cause a slight ghosting effect with fast motion which can make an image look blurred I do find that meta's implementation of motion smoothing however is very good especially at 120 FPS with your PC only needing to generate 60 frames per second and there will be very little ghosting or blurring if any at all from testing steam link though I did find at times where I pushed my system that re projection ratio was displayed in fps VR but it always remained at 0% and my FPS wasn't hared so if this is correct reprojection at least for me Isn't activating so if I set all of my settings towards the high end with the maximum encode resolution the maximum Target bandwidth and at 72 htz with a high resolution in a game such as project cars 2 with the graphical settings set to ultra or as high as they go my latency is around 60 milliseconds which is pretty high however the image quality is excellent and I would say is very similar to the best virtual desktop or Oculus link over USB has to offer at a similar latency in a game such as halflife Alex my latency at these maximum settings is around 40 milliseconds and again the picture quality is excellent now fine-tuning the settings to give me the best latency by setting the resolution to around 2500 by 2500 pixels per I keeping the encode resolution the same the target bandwidth being set to 75 megabits per second and running at 120 FPS I managed to get latency in the 20s for halflife Alex which is excellent although image quality has taken a bit of a hit it is still pretty good this would give a better experience in games such as beat saber online shooters or where reaction times are critical I have experienced quite a few crashes with steam link however for the image quality and latency I have been quite impressed and it will be interesting to see how steam link develops in the future I hope this has been helpful and once again thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Day Dreamer VR

Views: 37,373

Keywords: steam link, steam vr, steam link settings guide, steam link review, steam link vs virtual desktop, steam link vs oculus link, stream vr settings guide, pcvr, pcvr settings guide, quest 3 pcvr settings guide, quest 3 settings for pcvr, meta quest 3, vr, virtual reality, vr gaming, meta, quest 3, meta quest 2 oculus link, steam link app, steam

Id: pbaRjaHtCZM

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 02 2023