Finally, it’s over. After like 10 months, I can use the Meta Quest Link for PCVR again because NVIDIA fixed the issue with its drivers. And if you had the same issue, you probably can too!
Meta Quest Link freezing issue
If you are unaware of what I’m talking about: starting at the beginning of this year, newer NVIDIA drivers have caused Meta Quest Link to freeze. Like, you were using it, and at a random moment, the frame in front of you froze, and weird artifacts appeared in front of your face. The only solution, at that point, was to restart the Meta Quest service… just to see this happen again after a few minutes. It was incredibly frustrating.
It was a problem related to some NVIDIA cards. People with other graphics cards were not affected. And some people with NVIDIA cards were not affected either. But a big number of people, me included, were. And it was very ironic, because the problem for me started just a short time after I got my new beast PC.
The workarounds
Meta studied the problem and clarified that it was an issue on NVIDIA’s side. But NVIDIA took a lot of time to look into it, probably because at this moment, VR is not exactly its priority.
In the meantime, the community found some workarounds:
- You could eliminate the problem by manually downgrading your graphics card driver to v591.86 or earlier
- You could reduce the occurrence of the freezes by keeping an updated driver and disabling Sliced Encoding in the Meta Quest Link settings
Otherwise, you could just use another provider, like Virtual Desktop or Steam Link. These were not affected. And this is what I did: I used Steam Link a lot during these months.
The fix landed with the latest drivers
Finally, NVIDIA started working on the fix a few weeks ago, and released the fix in its v621.01 of its game driver. The release notes of that driver, in fact, report:
Fixed General Bugs:
– Meta Horizon Link stream may freeze when connected over USB [6292679]
The irony is that I could not install it, because my beast has an enterprise GPU, so I had to wait for the enterprise driver to implement the fix, and it finally happened yesterday, with v621.14 of the enterprise driver.
I installed it yesterday afternoon, and I tested it for more than one day, both with AirCar, Gracia, DeoVR, Unity… and never had a single freeze! It has been so liberating. Thanks, Meta and NVIDIA, for taking care of this.
Why does it matter?
You may wonder why this is so relevant, if solutions like Virtual Desktop work even better than the Quest Link. Well, there are a few reasons:
- Quest Link is the solution I used the most since the beginning, so I’m emotionally attached to it 😀
- Until a few months ago, Quest Link was the only solution working via USB cable. I have the official Quest cable, so it is ideal to use Quest Link
- If you need to run an app you have on the Quest PC Store, that is the way
No one of them is fundamental, but actually there is a final one that is much more important: as a developer, the official Quest Link allows me to stream passthrough, eyes, and hands data from the Quest to the PC. This means that when I’m developing in Unity a mixed reality application, I don’t have to build and run it to see how it would look in the headset. I just press Play, and I can test the app in mixed reality in PCVR. This allows me to develop much faster.
Go get the new drivers
So if you have the same problem, open your NVIDIA App and update your drivers to the version I mentioned, or a newer one. If the NVIDIA App has any issue, go to the NVIDIA website and download the driver manually. Hopefully, it will fix the problem for you, too.
The final irony
My life can be ironic: I was so happy to finally see this problem fixed… and yet I had to uninstall the new driver just now. The reason? It conflicts with a certain application for a VR project I have to ship as a developer.
It seems I can’t find peace…
(Header image by NVIDIA)