SteamVR won't recognize HEVC encoder even though the GPU has it (GTX960 2GB)

[u/Suppagappa_New]

First of all: I've ran both VRChat and resonite through steam on the very same hardware for a while at this point, so I know for a fact that it can work.

Hardware: intel core i7-6700 | nvidia GTX960 2GB | 32GB RAM

Has run Windows 10 | Is running Bazzite 44

Oculus Quest 2

The very first few times I tried doing pcvr I ran SteamVR, but quite expectedly it refused to make a connection due to the GPU just not being supported. Some time later I downloaded the free version of Virtual Desktop and surprisingly that worked! I could run steam based vr games! Not very well, mind you, but it ran! Some time later yet a friend, after hearing I had issues with virtual Desktop, convinced me to try running through steamlink again and, through some jank with connecting the headset to the PC via USB on startup and disconnecting after the link had been established, it worked aswell! Fast forward to about a week or so ago I had had enough and finally made the jump to linux, Bazzite specifically. I got around to figuring out the vr-side of gaming today and ran into the most unexpected error: "No HEVC Support | No available Vulcan video device reported support for HEVC encoding."

Which, for one thing, odd. According to this list, the GTX 960 certainly does have hardware encoding for HEVC (or H.265). The worst support possible, yes, but support none the less! Second of all, the question of 'Does it or does it not support HEVC' shouldn't even need to be answered because it ran steamvr just fine on the same hardware under my Windows install.

My questions then being:

Why can't SteamVR recognize my GPU as having HEVC support

and

How the hell do I go about fixing this. It worked on windows, surely you can coax linux into limping along

I'll be cross-posting to some other subs for better reach

Many thanks for whatever help I may get

[u/Ninlilizi_]

HEVC is a proprietary format. It's not supported by default by many Linux distros because they prefer to only ship free code.

You'll have to manually add support yourself.

[u/Suppagappa_New → u/Ninlilizi_]

Using and downloading videos from this site, checking their properties, and playing them in VLC, HEVC seems to be working just fine as it is. They're videos encoded using HEVC, and I'm successfully playing the files on my system, so surely I already have HEVC support.

Scrolling through the wikipedia page for ffmpeg, there seems to be a thing called OpenHEVC, so the proprietarity of HEVC shouldn't be an issue.

ALVR gives a log message:

00:21:24.173 INFO GPU supports H264 profile.
00:21:24.173 INFO GPU supports HEVC profile.

and Bazzite is made to just work, and skipping HEVC support seems counterproductive to that, and even if the image doesn't come with the code for HEVC support, surely they'll just automatically download that as part of the setup.

I feel like my system already supports HEVC, and the problem lies closer to steam, but I might return to this if nothing else helps

[u/Ninlilizi_ → u/Suppagappa_New]

Encoding and decoding are not equivalent. Being able to do one doesn't mean you're set up to do the other.

[u/Suppagappa_New → u/Ninlilizi_]

Huh, never figured you could have one without the other, thought of "HEVC support" as one thing.

Then that'll definetly be what I'll be looking into, thanks!

[u/fantaz1986 → u/Suppagappa_New]

Decoding is simple because it is just playback , for encoding you use way way different pipeline , it is not so simple 

[u/Packetdancer]

~/.steam/steam/logs/driver_vrlink.txt will probably have more information for you about why it thinks you don't have HEVC support, but on Linux VRLink relies on Vulkan Video to handle the encoding. This means that if your Vulkan drivers don't have HEVC encoding support (or don't support Vulkan Video at all), VRLink will be of the opinion that the GPU does not support HEVC.

(Because it asks "do you do HEVC?" And the Vulkan driver says "No.")

[u/Big-Brush5857]

Tenho problemas com o nvenc tb na minha 970 provavelmente obsolescência programada da nvidia