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Comment by theschwa | Hacker News Reader

With the Quest being able to be used as both a PC VR and and standalone, why not Quest? I'm saying this as someone who owns 4 different VR headsets, and I find myself using my Quest 1 the most.

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Interesting - i steered away of oculus generally speaking as it was by far the buggiest headset I owned. From what gather tho it can only play low spec games decently. For instance, how does it handle Alyx?

I think it can only play Alyx through the link on PC, unless Valve decides to port it at some point in the future, which seems unlikely since they have their own investments in VR as a platform.

Valve is not able to port it - and likely never will be - simply because as a low end headset, the quest cant handle it. From what i read, oculus link leads to latency and compression quality losses so it cant really he played via cable either.

There are two ways to play pc vr games on quest. First is via wifi, with apps like Virtual Desktop, this gives you very good quality, but depending on your setup can range between perfectly acceptable latency, or terrible jittering and lag.

Oculus link gives you very good latency, but with the default settings the quality leaves a lot to be desired. You can tweak the render settings though, which fixes the issue, and it ends up looking about as good as Virtual Desktop. Only real unsolvable problem is the cable, but it's not a huge issue for me.

Alyx is quite playable through both of these setups (assuming good latency for a virtual desktop setup).

Take a look at 29:40 in Carmack's video. The Quest 1 link was running at just 150mbps due to encoder limitations and it apparently ran on a USB 2 cable and you didn't even need their fancy long USB 3 cable. Sounds like there's a lot more available encoder bandwidth on the Quest 2, so I'm hoping link will end up almost as good as traditionally wired VR.

The visual quality of the Index is hard to compare to the Quest.

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