Recently, the Quest version of Steam Link added advanced oversampling filtering.
Earlier this month, Valve launched Steam Link, a free, official streaming tool on the Meta Quest platform, allowing users to quickly and easily wirelessly connect their Quest headset to SteamVR. With the tool, Quest users can play well-known PCVR games like Half-Life: Alyx over a wireless WiFi network. In addition, users can experience traditional flat games through VR headsets.
Advanced oversampling filtering has been an option for SteamVR since 2017, but Valve says Meta headsets "accidentally disabled" it a few years ago, and that's "another change*** The latest SteamVR beta update brings it back to Steam Link and the Quest version of Quest Link."
Supersampling refers to rendering at a higher resolution than the headset display panel to produce a sharper, more perceptually detailed image while reducing noise, and can be optionally enabled on PCVR. After rendering, the higher-resolution image needs to be downsampled and sent to the headset at its original resolution. SteamVR's advanced oversampling filtering option is a newer approach that produces less noise, but at the cost of a slightly softer image.
To notice the effect of advanced oversampling filtering, users need to use very high resolution values in the SteamVR ** settings, so it's most useful for users with ultra-high-end graphics cards.
The update also adds 10-bit color depth** encoding to AMD graphics cards that support this feature, which should significantly reduce the color ramp for superior image quality, especially in any case with different color gradients, such as fog or darkness. However, Valve noted that Steam Link's support for AMD is still experimental in general.
The Steam Link update is as follows:
Enable 10-bit encoding on AMD graphics cards with this feature
Enable Advanced Oversampling Filtering, which improves quality when using high oversampling rates. This would be a significant improvement for users who see poor quality when not using the Auto setting;
Debugging UI improvements;
Fixed an issue where network latency deteriorated by reducing the impact of flow resets in non-optimal wireless configurations;
Connections are allowed to proceed even in network configurations that do not have QoS support.