How much bandwidth does the Vive Focus 3 actually need?

[Tausendberg]

One bit of advice I was given about VR over wifi is that I should manually set to a 40 mhz channel after checking the local wifi for an unused channel.

I thought that would be more than enough because the streaming bitrate topped out at 200 mbps and while 40mhz allows for around 500 but after switching it to 40mhz, the performance of VBS was very choppy (200 mbps, no sharpening, 2048 by 2048) and after trying several things I opened up my wifi 6 router settings and looked at the transmission rates of the connected devices and I noticed that the Focus 3 was maxing out the transmission rate, when I would've expected it to be around 200 mbps.

I switched it back to 80 mhz and suddenly the performance was smooth as silk again and when I looked at the transmission rate inside the router I saw that it had gone way up, to over 1000 mbps actually.

So, that begs the question, how much bandwidth does the Focus 3 really need and use, it's much more than the listed streaming bitrate, right?

[Tausendberg]

So here I have the streaming bitrate set to 75 mbps and the profile set to performance and it's maxing out the 80 mhz channel according to my router, is it possible I'm misunderstanding something?

[vrwanter]

1 hour ago, Tausendberg said:

So here I have the streaming bitrate set to 75 mbps and the profile set to performance and it's maxing out the 80 mhz channel according to my router, is it possible I'm misunderstanding something?

 

I think you might be misunderstanding? The headset is connecting at 1200mbps, but if you look at you network traffic in task manager, it will only be sending 75mbps over the link.

[GhostPsi]

9 hours ago, Tausendberg said:

One bit of advice I was given about VR over wifi is that I should manually set to a 40 mhz channel after checking the local wifi for an unused channel.

I thought that would be more than enough because the streaming bitrate topped out at 200 mbps and while 40mhz allows for around 500 but after switching it to 40mhz, the performance of VBS was very choppy (200 mbps, no sharpening, 2048 by 2048) and after trying several things I opened up my wifi 6 router settings and looked at the transmission rates of the connected devices and I noticed that the Focus 3 was maxing out the transmission rate, when I would've expected it to be around 200 mbps.

I switched it back to 80 mhz and suddenly the performance was smooth as silk again and when I looked at the transmission rate inside the router I saw that it had gone way up, to over 1000 mbps actually.

So, that begs the question, how much bandwidth does the Focus 3 really need and use, it's much more than the listed streaming bitrate, right?

You need the 200mbps aka you need to be able to send 24mb/s stable trough your router and your router needs to be able to handle that routing without interference if you wanna run the headset to its full potential. I think the 40mhz channel is 287MBPS under perfect conditions which we all know doesnt happen anywhere other than at labs. 

My setup is a Unify dream router with wifi optimized wifi6 and a 12900k + 3080. I also changed the config file to run 2662x2662 or 2442x2442 and I max out my GPU encoding at 95%, my PC is sending 190mpbs and I have no packet losses happening. So yeah you need to be able to send X amount of data depending on resolution you wanna stream. 

[Tausendberg]

2 hours ago, GhostPsi said:

YI think the 40mhz channel is 287MBPS under perfect conditions which we all know doesnt happen anywhere other than at labs. 

Thank you for saying this cause before I got the Focus 3 I actually didn't really know much about how wifi precisely works, it's not my area of expertise, and things like this aren't obvious but yes, I've checked task manager and saw that when VBS is running at full, it tops out at 200 mbps exactly, which relieves one of my anxieties, that the Focus 3 maybe had a hidden need for over 1000 mbps and consequently my router, which doesn't have one of those fancy 2.5gbps ports, was bottlenecking it at the ethernet connection. 

So, I guess, yeah, if I lived in a faraday cage with the router mounted to the ceiling directly over the center of my play space, 40 mhz would be enough, but for more real world conditions, 80 mhz is good to have for 200 mbps.

This also helps me better understand why neither Vive or Meta pushes past the 200 mbps mark. Even if on paper the hardware can do 500 mbps, getting completely stable 500 mbps over the air is extremely unlikely, I guess, unless you're using 6E

Edited March 31, 2022 by Tausendberg
6e

[HackPerception]

WiFi streaming solutions start to get complex over a standard home network above 100mps due to network conditions and the challenge of encoding/decoding the stream without introducing latency and artifacts.

The encoding/decoding steps are a huge part of the current ceiling.

[Tausendberg]

I see, so even if I was using a Wifi 6E router and could reliably transmit a much higher bit rate there is a bottleneck at the video card or the qualcomm xr2?