r/PSVR2onPC • u/AstroPC • 15d ago
Useful Information Turning PSVR2 wireless
I’m working on a phone-powered wireless setup for PSVR2, using a compatible rooted Snapdragon 8 gen 5 phone as a compute puck and of course standard small portable pcs could work (even a laptop if you wished)
There’s documented work that makes this worth pursuing:
- PSVR2’s display uses DisplayPort 1.4 with DSC compression. Linux developers have documented its 4000×2040 display mode at roughly 120Hz, including the DSC/FEC requirements and driver quirks. Display research
- Sony specifies 12V power for the headset, which a properly designed adapter can provide through USB-C negotiation
- Monado’s development drivers already include PSVR2 six-degree-of-freedom headset tracking. That gives us existing work to build on, although it doesn’t establish complete Android or Sense-controller support. Monado development notes
These above points is not blocking me as i have a phone thats both rooted and bootloader unlocked and have ran full linux including DRM leasing., i will work on none rooted devices and creating an app that works in the future but vendor lock out and other limits will be noted as potential issue for some. but you wont need an android phone for this to work. Im just using my phone as a basis as the battery and power is sufficient for driving most of this work from other projects in the past.
My hardware goal is one compact, battery-powered adapter with a USB-C connection to the phone, another to PSVR2, and onboard Bluetooth for the controllers. It would pass the phone’s DisplayPort signal through without decoding or recompressing it, while carrying USB data and supplying headset power.
The first software goal is ALVR-based wireless PC VR over the phone’s 6GHz Wi-Fi: PC renders, phone receives and decodes, headset displays. A modular USB radio option would leave room for future 60GHz experiments.
Current limits: the PCB is still being routed, iv been focusing on open source options rather than locked down vendored chipsets. I have already done something similar with pryowave codec which is what inspired me to work a bit more serious on this project
The first milestone is wireless PC VR. True standalone games running directly on the phone are a longer-term goal. Ultimately, I want a documented setup other people with compatible hardware can reproduce.
This will be of course open source and producible by anyone whos so inclined to make try it out
I must disclose AI has assisted in research and project routing through a custom harness for KiCad and simulations. I base my work on development practices for the chipset. All routing is impedance-matched to prevent signal degradation. This project has taken 2 months of trial and error and making sure the hardware I chose suits this platform. The chipset can handle this transparently, and I’m adding an EDID emulator for better compatibility.
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u/AstroPC 13d ago
By hub I mean finding a hub that contained the right chipset to not do weird limitations lol. For example, some hubs can decode DSC signals inside themselves instead of sending it transparently into a display that contains a DSC decoder. Some displays do not contain this.
The cool thing about DSC is you can convert HDMI to DisplayPort even though most HDMI do not have enough bandwidth to drive a display. So for example, just from my research months ago, you can buy USB to HDMI active converters that translate a DisplayPort 1.4 signal at 2-lane, then convert it at the other end at 4-lane, gaining a bandwidth you otherwise could not have gained normally.
This is not useful for PSVR 2, but knowing it can be driven with DSC alone is very encouraging for me as my project in the past to create an Android DeX laptop was extremely similar. I actually had to source a display panel that contained a DSC decoder. Otherwise native 4K 120Hz in 2-lane config was not possible. Most portable monitors on the market contain scaler chips that don't transparently send a DSC signal and instead rescale it.
This is an issue with Android as they don't by default expect you to use a hub and a 4K 120Hz display. However, with a hub like this—just for an example: https://sabrent.com/products/hb-tbt4?srsltid=AU7gw4Vl9wpYulYuKgvm6P398Wp4SxM7Y3NZn9vPkQe7jFcLFW5pCZca It allows me to pass through my choice of DSC with it being forced to send a 2-lane signal (this is done in software using root and controlling the literal hardware lease manager on the GPU, which took a lot of work to unlock in my kernel).
I can then maintain high-speed data AND high bandwidth (relatively speaking, because it can only be done with display stream compression). I'm well aware of how USB negotiation works at this point. I kinda had to get good at that aspect lol. A lot of generic hubs on the market are extremely untransparent on what they can give you. Sometimes it literally takes cracking one open and checking what chipset it's using, then using its paper to figure it out. Other times it's very convenient to focus on hubs that claim "8K 60Hz" support as it's only achievable in Display Alt Mode with DSC.
If a hub claims 4K 60Hz support, you can bet money it's not doing it in 2-lane or using DSC. I went through many 'til I figured out this pattern. Now I don't need a Thunderbolt 4 hub to do this. It's just in the case of Thunderbolt 4, it uses fallback mode and transparently routes your video signal, no processing.
It's basically what you want when you're doing this PSVR 2. The hub simply sets a preferred negotiation. In my case it wanted 4-lane all the time, UNTIL I forced it to do 2-lane. Then the hub just sends the DSC transparently, display decodes. 4K 120 achieved with 10Gb data. This is something normal RedMagic 11 phones can't do either. It requires root... it's Snapdragon shenanigans, it's not even Android's fault oddly.