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Oculus link unplayably laggy through thunderbolt 3

notManalor
Honored Guest

Hi all,





I recently received my Oculus link
cable and have encountered an unplayable amount of lag using it. I own an Aero
15 X9 which, to my understanding, has two thunderbolt 3 ports. It has an rtx
2070 maxq and intel core i7 8750H.





At first I tried running Link
through one of the Thunderbolt ports to have it not work at all or (one time)
work briefly then immediately crash. After some frustration restarting, the
headset and rebooting the Oculus software, I finally switched to the other
Thunderbolt port and had it work at least semi-stably, though it still crashed
every so often.





At this point, the Link functions,
but has a metric ton of lag and compression artifacts in the Quest. At first, I
thought this might be my laptops gpu auto-switching at work where it will
switch to its intel UHD graphics 630 for less intensive tasks. I switched the
Oculus client off of this in the NVidia control panel t the NVidia graphics
card to no avail. It was a long shot anyway given that the image displayed on
the pc for vr applications was pretty much lag-free.





So now I'm stuck with an $80 Oculus
link cable that technically functions, but runs Link at about 10 fps in the
headset and has so many compression artifacts it looks like a deliberate glitch
effect. The only cause that comes to mind is that the Thunderbolt ports
themselves are too slow. This sounds unlikely as I've regularly run games
through both ports off of an external hard drive, but it's all I can think of.
On some occasions, external hard drives running off of these ports have come
loose. My last-ditch solution is to try an Arktek usb c to usb 3.0 adapter that I heard on
this forum works with the Link (can't post links onto the forums yet).





Any suggestions of what else I
should try?

Thanks!



P.S. I know I'm a beta tester that
should expect these kinds of issues to come up when using product still
technically being tested. I just am rather disgruntled that I'm experiencing this many issues with an $80 cable. I hope I haven't come off as too much of an entitled
consumer on this post, I am honestly am amazed that Oculus has this type of
feature functioning at all for so many people.

6 REPLIES 6

CovenantMG
Honored Guest
For what it's worth I've had the same experience on an Alienware m17 with similar specifications (rtx 2070, thunderbolt 3 and intel core 17 8750H) with the new Oculus link cable plugged into the thunderbolt port.  I had previously used the Occulus suggested Anker powerline cable, which was much cheaper (less than $20 on amazon now), and it actually worked very well with the oculus rift applications when plugged into a USB 3.1 port.  Unfortunately, I did have some crashes occur when trying to run steam games.    

The steam issues coupled with wanting some additional cable length led to deciding to purchase the official cable but it's completely unusable as it is now... If there are adapters/hubs etc. that someone has found I'd definitely be interested.   

CovenantMG
Honored Guest
Update:  I went into the nVidia control panel and changed the preferred graphics processor from "Auto-Select" to the nVidia under "Manage 3D settings".  This pretty much eliminated the lag and I was able to play a rift game.  I still had multiple crashes but that could be due to the beta nature of this feature.  

Image result for nvidia control panel manage 3d settings

notManalor
Honored Guest
Thanks for the suggestion, I tried to switching to max performance in Nvidia settings, which fixed some of the lag issues. However the issue still remains where the stream to the headset is extremely jenky. I still get a huge amount of screen tearing and the tracking lags behind, remaining just bearably usable. It's particularly hard to throw objects in games like boneworks where fast hand movement is required. I also see the edges of the rendered frame when I don't move my head very slowly, which I presume is the Links way of accounting for tracking that has lagged behind. My current prevailing theory is that the thunderbolt port on my laptop just isn't very secure as plugged in devices will often come loose.

I'm going to try the Anker 10ft usb c cable (still can't post links to this forum). If that works and the link cable doesn't, I'm definitely going to return the link cable and probably will anyway if this problem persists. I'll give an update when I'm able to test that cable which will be in stock on January 16th.

Anonymous
Not applicable
@notManalor how was your followup tests? I am looking to upgrade laptop soon. Any new insights? Thank you

notManalor
Honored Guest
UPDATE:

Sorry for the delay, had some other obligations and didn't get around to testing it.

The Anker USB cable works quite well! I will occasionally have the headset disconnect, causing me to have to restart the game I'm playing (all my vr games are Steamvr, can't speak to desktop Oculus games). Changing the power settings isn't even really necessary.

Judging by other people's experiences, I'd say it was more a problem with my thunderbolt 3 port than the cable itself, I'm going to try a more robust usb c to usb a adapter to see whether or not the link cable works that way. 10ft still isn't quite cutting it for length.

notManalor
Honored Guest
ANOTHER UPDATE:
So I got that USB C to USB A adapter and the link cable, and it doesn't work. I was pretty disappointed, but I still had a functioning cable, so it wasn't too bad.
On a whim, I decided to try the USB C port on my laptop again, and it worked! I have absolutely no idea what happened but my laptops thunderbolt 3 port is magically working with the link. I will say this is right after I got the v13 update, so maybe there was something in the patch. Oh the joys of paying for beta software.