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cube2222 13 hours ago

They're doing it over 6GHz, if I understand correctly, which with a dedicated router gets you to a reasonable latency with reasonable quality even without foveated rendering (with e.g. a Quest 3).

With foveated rendering I expect this to be a breeze.

monocasa 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Even 5.8Ghz is getting congested. There's a dedicated router in this case (a USB fob), but you still have to share spectrum with the other devices. And at the 160Mhz symbol rate mode on WiFi6, you only have one channel in the 5.8GHz spectrum that needs to be shared.

zamadatix 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're talking about "Wi-Fi 6" not "6 GHz Wi-Fi".

"6 GHz Wi-Fi" means Wi-Fi 6E (or newer) with a frequency range of 5.925–7.125 GHz, giving 7 non-overlapping 160 MHz channels (which is not the same thing as the symbol rate, it's just the channel bandwidth component of that). As another bonus, these frequencies penetrate walls even less than 5 GHz does.

I live on the 3rd floor of a large apartment complex. 5 GHz Wi-Fi is so congested that I can get better performance on 2.4 in a rural area, especially accounting for DFS troubles in 5 GHz. 6 GHz is open enough I have a non-conflicting 160 MHz channel assigned to my AP (and has no DFS troubles).

Interestingly, the headset supports Wi-Fi 7 but the adapter only supports Wi-Fi 6E.

esseph 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not so much of an issue when neighbors with paper thin walls see that 6ghz as a -87 signal

That said, in the US it is 1200MHz aka 5.925 GHz to 7.125 GHz.

monocasa 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

More of an issue when your phone's wifi or your partner watching a show while you game is eating into that one channel in bursts, particularly since the dedicated fob means that it's essentially another network conflicting with the regular WiFI rather than deeply collaborating for better real time guarantees (not that arbitrary wifi routers would even support real time scheduling).

MIMO helps here to separate the spectrum use by targeted physical location, but it's not perfect by any means.

cube2222 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

IMO there is not much reason to use WiFi 6 for almost anything else. I have a WiFi 6 router set up for my Quest 3 for PC streaming, and everything else sits on its 5GHz network. And since it doesn't really go through walls, I think this is a non-issue?

The Frame itself here is a good example actually - using 6GHz for video streaming and 5GHz for wifi, on separate radios.

My main issue with the Quest in practice was that when I started moving my head quickly (which happens when playing faster-paced games) I would get lag spikes. I did some tuning on the bitrate / beam-forming / router positioning to get to an acceptable place, but I expect / hope that here the foveated streaming will solve these issues easily.

monocasa 12 hours ago | parent [-]

The thing is that I'd expect foveated rendering to increase latency issues, not help them like it does for bandwidth concerns. During a lag spike you're now looking at an extremely down sampled image instead of what in non foveated rendering had been just as high quality.

Now I also wonder if an ML model could also work to help predict fovea location based on screen content and recent eye trackng data. If the eyes are reading a paragraph, you have a pretty good idea where they're going to go next for instance. That way a latency spike that delays eye tracking updates can be hidden too.

cube2222 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My understanding is that the foveated rendering would reduce bandwidth requirements enough that latency spikes become effectively non-existent.

We’ll see in practice - so far all hands-on reviewers said the foveated rendering worked great, with one trying to break it (move eyes quickly left right up down from edge to edge) and not being able to - the foveated rendering always being faster.

I agree latency spikes would be really annoying if they end up being like you suggest.

monocasa 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Enough bandwidth to absolve any latency issues over a wireless connection is not really a thing for a low latency use case like foveated rendering.

What do you do when another device on the main wifi network decides to eat 50ms of time in the channel you use for the eye tracking data return path?

cube2222 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I believe all communication with the dongle is on 6GHz - both the video and the return metadata.

So again, you just make sure the 6GHz band in the room is dedicated to the Frame and its dongle.

The 5GHz is for WiFi.

ncallaway 4 hours ago | parent [-]

On the LTT video he also said that Valve had claimed to have tested with a small number of devices in the same room, but hadn’t tried out larger scenarios like tens of devices.

My guess based on that is you likely dont need to totally clear 6GHz in the room the Frame is in, but rather just make sure its relatively clear.

We’ll know more once it ships and we can see people try it out and try and abuse the radio a bit.

entropicdrifter 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Pretty funny to me that you're backseat engineering Valve on this one. If it didn't have a net benefit they wouldn't have announced it as a feature yet lmao

monocasa 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not saying it doesn't work; I'm asking what special sauce they've added to make it work, and noting that despite the replies I've gotten, foveated streaming doesn't help latency, and in fact makes the effects of latency spikes worse.

esseph 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

MU-MIMO is very nice.

cyberax 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The One Big Beautiful Bill fixed that. Now a large part of this spectrum will be sold out for non-WiFi use.

brian-armstrong 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Oh goody! I hope some of it can be used for DRM encrypted TV broadcasts too.

esseph 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Different spectrum. They're grabbing old radar ranges.

Also talking about adding more spectrum to the existing ISM 6GHz band.

cyberax 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Here's the overview: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/senate-gop-budge...