Oculus Quest can function as a PC VR headset with the Oculus Link feature which was introduced in beta late last year. At launch the feature only supported USB 3.0 cables, which somewhat awkwardly didn’t include the cable that came in the box with Quest. A recent update to Oculus Link now allows Quest to use the feature with USB 2.0 cables, including the one it ships with.
Our friends over at Cas & Chary VR tested the change to Oculus Link with Quest using the included USB 2.0 cable and found that it seems to work just as well as USB 3.0 cables which were originally the only supported option, presumably due to bandwidth requirements.
While some people already seem to have received the necessary update to their Oculus desktop software to support tethering to Quest with USB 2.0 cables, if you can’t seem to get it to work you may need to opt into the beta version of the Oculus software.
Oculus hasn’t made an official announcement about the change, but it did quietly change the official Oculus Link specs from “1x USB 3.0 ports” to simply “1x USB port.”
It isn’t clear if the change is due to optimizations to Oculus Link which may have reduced bandwidth requirements, or if the company had simply set the bar a little too high in the first place.
That makes it a little awkward though that Oculus introduced its own $80 Oculus Link cable, only to turn around and make it so that the cable that comes included with Quest would work just fine. Granted, the cable included with Quest is only 10 feet long—just a little too short for our taste—whereas Oculus’ official Link cable is a more comfortable 16 feet.
That said, Cas & Chary tested the included Quest USB 2.0 cable with a USB extender and found that it also works just fine, so we’d still highly recommend picking up an inexpensive extender to get a lot more slack in your tether.
It should be said that USB cables with more bandwidth may allow for higher quality visuals when using Oculus Link, but so far we haven’t seen reports that this is the case. While it’s convenient to be able to use the USB 2.0 cable included with Quest for Oculus Link, if you’re planning on getting a longer cable or an extender, it would probably be wise to get a USB 3.0 cable just to future-proof yourself with more bandwidth.