Shadow VR Nightmare

It doesn’t have to be buddy!! What’s the problem? How are you connecting your Quest? My experience with VR on shadow has been pretty slick. Remember to have a reliable connection and optimize the f*** out of it. Ethernet connection to turn on your shadow preferably.

the Shadow VR Alpha is still very early in development and it’s very hard to play tbh. I have had better luck with Virtual Desktop. 
 

Also, if you’re already using Virtual Desktop: set your streaming bitrate to around 50 if you’re playing an online game, you can fiddle around it though, if you’re online you can probably go up to 90. I have my quality settings set at medium; FPS at 120; I use the SWS setting too; shadow bitrate to 1 Mpbs, for the quality settings tho sometimes I go down to low/medium. You can go high and ultra but you’ll probably get lower FPS. Remember that Shadow only has 100 Mbps of upload. 

Yeah, I never had good luck with the Alpha. Heard you can also risk losing your data if you’re not too careful. Anyway, but with Virtual Desktop: where I noticed the real difference, was when I bought Netgear’s Nighthawk XR1000 router. It helped me so much, if you wanna look into it. I am aware there are other routers advertised in the Shadow discord and the VD discord, I’m just saying I’ve been getting really good throughput on it; that XR1000 has been nothing but good to my gaming, it’s for gaming after all… I usually get around 40-50 ms of latency on the networking side of VD and 25-35 más of latency on shadow! I race on iracing and it’s been such an enjoyment. Try to set your NVIDIA quality settings accordingly too on shadow, it might help!

The netgear XR1000 is actually like 299 though lol; but tbh as long as you get a wifi 6 router no matter how budget friendly is, you’re going to notice such a big difference. Also make sure your device is the only one connected. If you can’t do that, maybe look into transforming your new wifi 6 router into a Wireless Access Point. 
 

i run my XR1000 as my main router then an old Nighthawk XR300 as a wireless AP for the rest of the family (which is the budget version but it isn’t Wifi6), I am the only one using the Wifi6 router. The XR300 is connected to the main router via Ethernet. And Wireless AP enabled. 

Getting an internet pipe just for yourself would solve your issue but idk if you wanna have two different services. Live your life tho who cares be happy haha but This is what confused me the most at the beginning of using VD because it is not the “amount” of data you have that will limit you, yes it is good to have large enough bandwidth and even 0.5 Gigs is just enough. I tell you because it is what I got. And rather what actually limits your capability on Virtual Desktop is the fact that you have so many devices talking to each other AT THE SAME TIME. And because you’re using like 50+ Mpbs constantly over the internet, sometimes you get latency spikes because it has to wait until the data of other devices get through. So your data gets caught up in a queue and sometimes it skips or if you have the buffer enabled on VD it just gets out of sync. But your main issue is that you’re probably not using Wifi 6 ready hardware, which is actually made to contradict this issue of different devices talking to each other and causing lag and getting caught up in a Queue. This is also why I am the only one using the wifi 6 router either way though, I don’t want to risk any unnecessary latency I could’ve avoided by setting up a wireless AP for the family. And I mean “risk” because I try to play very competitively on iRacing: I think that should let you know how much of a game changer those routers were for me. Lol
 

But Read up on QoS and bandwidth allocation, the Nighthawk routers come installed with this DumaOS service that let you allocate bandwidth and you can set up some sort of limiter as well so this issue does not happen to you. As well as triggering ports, and all that jazz. It’s a very capable service in my opinion. 

Yeah! But you don’t have to bridge the two routers though, I do not recommend that at all since you’d just divide your bandwidth up. An extender works worse for your case because you’d actually be splitting the bandwidth and allocating it like half and half so you get worse latency spikes since both routers will be connecting to “some” other port and that is where another issue exists. The DumaOS QoS and bandwidth allocation service fixes this though and limits the amount of bandwidth some devices use up so you never ever ever get any latency spikes. But to finish this Anyway … I would suggest going full wireless AP mode on an old router (which will connect to an ethernet port on your main router) then using your new Wifi 6 router as your main router. Since the wireless AP does not act as a router, you’re not allocating any bandwidth to it and literally just acts as a wireless access point quite literally as an extension of one of your ethernet ports and acts as wireless sooooo you get the connectivity of an Ethernet connection but wireless lol. Which you probably know, but all your devices will enjoy 1 Gigabit of connectivity because of this!!

No problem! I had a rough start with shadow too as I’ve explained before, lots of people on Discord can be a little mean sometimes haha so if I can aid people into less stress that I went through, I’ll gladly do it! I’ll try to keep up with my emails on here and see if I get a notification from this post in the future!