SteamVR beta 2.18.1 ends right-eye ghosting, say 8 of the 12 who reported it
Eight of the 12 Linux owners who reported right-eye ghosting through Steam Link say SteamVR beta 2.18.1 has ended it. Valve's patch notes for that beta, published September 23, say it "Fixed cases of video corruption, checkerboarding, and stuck streams" in Steam Link, without naming the ghosting or the people who chased it.
Valve's SteamVR store artwork, the Steam logo and the SteamVR wordmark on a blue and magenta background. Image: Valve
The symptom was narrow and unpleasant. The left eye stayed clean while the right eye doubled or juddered for as long as the wearer kept moving, and stopped the instant the head was still.
The owner who opened the report had ruled out the obvious first. Changing the Quest's refresh rate between 72, 80, 90 and 120Hz made no difference, and neither did lowering the render resolution, resetting SteamVR's settings file or clearing a stale network interface that had been forcing stream resets.
Owners found the stutter in the stream itself
The report was opened on September 4 by an owner streaming to a Quest 3S from CachyOS, and 11 more owners posted the same thing over the following 18 days. Between them they covered six headset models: Quest 2, Quest 3, Quest 3S, Quest Pro, Pico 4 and Pico 4 Ultra, every owner who named a graphics card named an AMD one, and all of them were streaming through Steam Link rather than the headsets' own software.
One of them dumped the encoded video Steam Link was sending and played it back on the desktop. "Left eye is good, but right eye stutters in motion, visible both in headset and on dumped bitstream", that owner wrote on September 18, which put the fault in the video the PC had already encoded.
Opening any overlay made it stop
The workaround owners settled on was odd enough to be useful. "The ghosting doesn't happen when WayVR is running and any WayVR window is somewhere in the world", one wrote on September 20, and three others found the plain SteamVR dashboard did the same job while it was open.
That is owners' testing, not Valve advice, and none of it is needed on 2.18.1 according to the eight who have retested. Their confirmations ran from September 24, the day after the beta arrived, to September 27, and those who listed their versions were on SteamVR beta 2.18.1 with Steam Link 2.0.24.2395. "SteamVR Beta 2.18.1 fixed the issue for me, thanks devs", one owner wrote.
The fix is still on the beta channel
2.18.1 is a beta, and getting it means opting into the SteamVR beta. The default branch has stood at 2.17.10 since Valve's hotfix on September 18, which is the version most of the reports were filed against.
Valve has not linked its patch note to the report, and has not closed it either: it flagged the thread for retesting on September 24. The same beta changed the driver interfaces third-party add-ons use and added tethered Quest streaming over USB, so anyone opting in for the ghosting fix gets those too.
Twelve owners is the whole documented count, and the four who have not confirmed the fix have posted nothing since the beta shipped.
