Wireless VR Flight Simming - Everything in One Thread

[Aurelius999]

Gents of the Forum (and those rare ladies) - You don't have to be a prophet to see that in the years ahead, VR headsets will increasingly drop the need for a data cable snaking from your desktop rig up to your head. I had a bit of time during the nights in late March and early April and decided to make a guide for what is coming down the pike, ... wireless VR simming:

 

https://limewire.com/d/Qdvdk#t5e3KXOE4e

 

We are already in the early stages but most guys have a boatload of questions about everything from wireless communications to the best bit rate settings. This guide aims to answer a plethora of questions:

 

What VR headset is best in 2025 if I want to ditch the cables?

 

How do I maximize wireless information flow from the graphics card to the VR headset?

 

How do I set up my wireless router for wireless VR flight simming?

 

How does wireless transmission of information even work?

 

What can I realistically expect in the next few years? ... In the next few decades?

 

I am hopeful that this work will be useful to the IL2 community. The guide is free to all and no attempt is being made to make money from it. All the images within are open source or I have obtained permission to use (still trying to nail down one last image). I am optimistic that almost everyone from hardcore simmers to tech-enthusiasts will find the information contained within the guide useful. If you have accolades, please post them in this thread. If you find errors, please send me privately. .... LOL, ... I'm just sh#%%ing you. ... If you notice any errors, please post them in this thread. I welcome correction and suggestions. If there is a feature you would like the guide to address, please post below. I will also try to help those who have questions or problems concerning wireless VR headset use (just be forewarned that it may take a bit due to work and family).

Enjoy!

 

- J

 

(This guide is released under the GPL 2.0. If you are a member of multiple flight sim forums (say, DCS, MSFS 2024, X-Plane, etc .... ), please feel free to distribute there as well because the information contained within the guide is going to be equally helpful for those simming communities as well.)

 

[Aurelius_IL2]

(Really wish they would let us modify our own prior posts indefinitely.)

 

The previous link above is now dead.

 

The Guide has been updated to Version 1.1 with some small corrections:

 

The Wireless VR Flight Simming Guide (No Politics) 1.1

Edited May 6 by Aurelius_IL2

[FTC_ChilliBalls]

small correction regarding Virtual Desktop, on p49 you write:

 

This is somewhat incorrect, what they are showing is not a fixed theoretical bit rate, but rather the currently max achievable bitrate.

 

To illustrate, this are the rates in my current 5GHz network environment (guess which one is my dedicated router 😜):

 

Max rate here refers to the hardware limit, achievable rate to what Virtual Desktop are referring to.

A perhaps small, but important distinction. Here is what the VD devs have to say to this:

Edited May 26 by FTC_ChilliBalls

[Aurelius_IL2]

Unos sum etos, .... et ergo, ... the theoretical bit rate = max achievable bit rate. (I do appreciate though when others with a steely eye to attention keep me honest  )

Edited May 29 by Aurelius_IL2

[Dutch2]

As most here are flyers and racesimmers only, maybe an additional chapter, with a wired connection could also be interesting. Especially now WMR has been abandoned in the Win11 upgrade and Win10 is in October EOL.  
Think for the most WMR users the Q3 is the best VR alternative with an affordable price. 

Edited May 29 by Dutch2

[Aurelius_IL2]

I agree Dutch, the Quest 3 is most likely the best alternative to the HP Reverb G2. I really liked that headset!

[Dutch2]

On 5/29/2025 at 8:23 PM, Aurelius_IL2 said:

I agree Dutch, the Quest 3 is most likely the best alternative to the HP Reverb G2. I really liked that headset!

I’m orientating for the Q3, but with a cable that also does have a power supply, the whole wire less is too expensive route and I do not need this as a being a desk VRplayer.  Do you know what to look for, as there are so many different brands available. Is there a quality aspect I should be looking for, like the amount of data transmission a cable can handle. 

[chiliwili69]

28 minutes ago, Dutch2 said:

the whole wire less is too expensive route

 

Why do think the wireless route is more expensive? because the router?

 

I have a Quest3 and use the wireless route. The quality of cable and wireless is the same since the decoding limit of the XR2 Gen2 chip of the Quest3 is the same for both methods (200Mbps for H265 codec).

 

I didn´t buy any router, I just use the Wifi 6 router from my internet provider which is sitting just 1 meter from my PC (using CAT 8 internet cable) and 1 meter from my flying seat.

Having a better router will not give me better results since my results are already perfect with this router.

This is my router (I just took the pictures from the web)

 

You can ask to your internet provider to upgrade your router to Wifi6 if it is not Wifi6. But a 40€ Wifi6 router is more than enough for the Quest3 if you are just 2 meters from PC, which is the usual case from most of us.

 

The another item is the battery, normally the Quest3 last 2 hours and then I use an extra battery 10000 mAh which gives me another 3+ hours.

https://www.amazon.es/NEWDERY-Paquete-colgante-reproducción-cargador/dp/B0CQ4BBDN1/?th=1

 

The problem with the wired USB-C cable is that the USB-C connector itself from the lateral side of the Quest3 is far from perfect. Also, according to another thread in this section, it seems there is a bugg in the software for the wired way.

[Aapje]

2 hours ago, Dutch2 said:

Do you know what to look for, as there are so many different brands available. Is there a quality aspect I should be looking for, like the amount of data transmission a cable can handle. 

 

You can just get a 10 Gbps cable from Aliexpress (5 Gbps is also sufficient). I use this one with a 2 meter length:

 

https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005006804425679.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.45.47c779d23dvRbM&gatewayAdapt=glo2nld

 

I have wrapped a bit of velcro around the headstrap that I route the cable through as stress relief and to improve comfort (the cable pulls on the headset much less this way):

 

 

Then I plug the cable into a powered USB 3 hub, that I also use for my joystick and throttle. This keeps my Quest charged while playing.

 

PS. I consider it mandatory to replace the headstrap for the Quest 3, but there are cheap options, like the Aubika: https://aubika.store/products/aubika-head-strap-for-meta-quest-3-elite-strap-for-quest-3-accessories

PS2. You can also get the one with battery if you might want to try wireless later, or want to also use the Quest for standalone games. It's not that much more expensive.

[Dutch2]

Thank you @Aapje and @chiliwili69  

In my case it’s not only the extra router but also an 1Gb hub for splitting the internet signal as I have only one cable in my mancave. 

[Aurelius_IL2]

Dutch, the cable you get does not matter that much so long as it is a fairly high-quality USB 3.2 Generation 1 or better model with transfer speeds of 5 Gbit/sec. (The reason for this is because sending an H.264 or H.265 compressed stream will not exceed 5 Gbps.) The one Aapje is recommending is great. The one I use myself (if flying wired) is this one:

 

Quest 3, 5 Gbps Cable (Works great!)

 

As to the Qualcomm, Snapdragon XR2 Gen2 chip on the Quest 3, I tested it with a modified form of iperf 3. The Quest 2 can reliably handle H.265 HEVC up to 150 Mbps, while the Quest Pro can do 220 Mbps, and the Quest 3 can do about the same. (This is a hard limit due to the architecture of the chip and the wattage that can be supplied by the headset battery to it.)  Realize that all three chips (the Snapdragon processors) can be sent more info than this, ... it is just that the latency rises when you get above about 150 Mbps for the Quest 2 or 220 Mbps for the Quest Pro or Quest 3 with H.265 (HEVC). I successfully sent over 660 Mbps of HEVC to the Quest Pro but the image in the headset was massively distorted. The little XR2+ Gen 1 chip was just all tuckered out

 

People also wonder about H.264 vs H.265 as well. I can stream H.264 at well over 800 Mbps from an RTX 4090 or 5090 because it's algorithm does not require as much computation. Even at 800+ Mbps though and you often will not get quite as good a picture in the headset as you will with H.265 (HEVC) or AV1 at 200 Mbps because H.265 just does better with less (the Claude Shannon mathematics and algorithm design of the H.265 are just more efficient for the type of neural network activation required by human V1 and V2 areas of the occipital lobe). HEVC can under specific conditions achieve compression rates close to 1000:1 but the downside is that it requires more work be done to do the compressing. For a given amount of joules, you can perform more H.264 compressing/decompressing or less H.265 compressing/decompressing. This is basic thermodynamics, ... there is no free lunch. (In a funny manner, this is also the reason why the upside down, alien spider head from the 1982 Thing movie is impossible in the time frame shown. To grow spider-like legs or eye stalks from an alien head, you need a shit-ton of order (that is enthalpy from a thermodynamic sense (mathematically)), ... which means that the tissue, ... the muscles, nerves, connecting tissue, specific cell types, and so on ...  have to be ordered on a molecular level in a very specific arrangement. That means that the enthalpy for that tissue (the information encoded by that tissue) will be extremely high, ... and there are limits to how fast you can encode that much information -> which means you can't grow an eye stalk out of a alien head in only four seconds (as shown in the movie). (And if an eye stalk suddenly grew out of a head in three seconds, the stalks and surrounding tissue would be white hot from the heat release. To suddenly put tissue in such an ordered state would mean the alien head would have to be tapping into a massive energy source and the resultant waste heat would make the tissue hotter than molten iron.) This is why a human fetus can't be made in only two months in a mother's womb. This is also the reason why some of the fastest growing organic eukaryotic material on the planet, ... (some types of sea kelp), ... can only achieve about one meter per day of growth. It is a Claude Shannon enthalpy limit. This is the exact reason why H.265 requires more work to be done and is also the precise electrical engineering reason why the Snapdragon XR2 Gen2 architecture carries certain decompressing limits.

 

 

Alien spider heads and the HEVC codec are actually connected! 

 

 

Also, no one needs a $600 flagship router. All that is needed for the Quest 2, Quest Pro, or Quest 3 is a decent dual or tri-band router than allows you to use your headset on the 5 GHz or 6 GHz band without interference from any other clients. If you only have a 2018 dual-band router, you will be fine as long as the Quest 3 is the ONLY client allowed to connect to the 5 GHz band. The TP-Link AXE5400 Tri-Band Wifi 6E (Archer AXE75), TP-Link BE3600 Dual-Band Wifi 7 (Archer BE230), and the venerable ASUS Dual-Band Wifi 6 RT-AX86U Pro (AX5700) are all excellent, fully mature wireless routers that are known for being relatively stable. The Snapdragon chips in the Quest Pro and Quest 3 can utilize up to 2x2, 160 MHz, Wifi 6E standards but will work fine with any stable 5 GHz band. You don't need 6 GHz bands at all.

Edited June 9 by Aurelius_IL2