VirtualLink

VirtualLink was an alternate mode of USB-C designed to carry the video, data and power needed by a PC-tethered virtual reality headset over a single cable and connector. A consortium led by NVIDIA, Oculus, Valve, AMD and Microsoft introduced it on 17 July 2018, and HTC joined in October 2018. The specification combined four lanes of HBR3 DisplayPort video, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 data channel for headset cameras and sensors, and up to 27 watts of power in one USB Type-C port.

NVIDIA built hardware support into its Turing graphics processors, and the GeForce RTX 20 series Founders Edition cards it announced in August 2018 all carried a VirtualLink port. Few headsets used it. Two enterprise headsets, the StarVR One and the 2020 generation of the VRgineers XTAL, were reported to support it, but no headset from Oculus, HTC or Valve did. Valve cancelled its VirtualLink adapter for the Valve Index in 2019. By September 2020 the consortium's website redirected to Wikipedia, VRgineers said the consortium had not operated for some time, and NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 30 series had no VirtualLink port.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Checked the spec, membership, GPU, laptop, headset, Valve Index adapter and abandonment claims against the consortium press release and archived site, NVIDIA's Turing white paper and Quadro release, AnandTech, Road to VR, UploadVR, VRgineers, Analogix and the two cited papers. About review dates.

Background

First-generation PC VR headsets connected to the computer through several plugs. In NVIDIA's description, a tethered headset needed a display cable to send images from the GPU to the headset's two displays, a cable to power the headset, and a USB connection to carry camera streams and read back head pose data. NVIDIA wrote that the number of cables could be uncomfortable for users, could limit how freely they moved, and made headsets bulkier to design. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive carried video over HDMI 1.3 connections.

Researchers working on wireless headsets described the same tether from another angle. In a 2017 paper at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, Omid Abari, Dinesh Bharadia, Austin Duffield and Dina Katabi of MIT wrote that high-quality headsets must stream several gigabits per second from the PC or console, so they relied on a cable that "not only limits the player's mobility and interferes with the VR experience, but also creates a tripping hazard since the headset covers the player's eyes". They argued that Wi-Fi could not carry such data rates and proposed a millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless link instead. A 2018 MobiSys paper by Luyang Liu and six co-authors made a similar point: high-quality VR systems generate graphics data faster than existing Wi-Fi and 60 GHz wireless products can carry, and the image encoding this requires makes VR latency targets hard to meet. VirtualLink kept the wire but tried to reduce it to one standard plug.

AnandTech's Ryan Smith wrote that the consortium also had laptops in mind. HDMI ports were uncommon on notebooks, and DisplayPort was spreading on them mainly through the USB-C alternate mode, so a single USB-C based connector was the most compatible choice. The consortium's own site listed thin and light notebooks and other small-form-factor devices as targets.

Technical design

VirtualLink was defined as a consortium-defined Alternate Mode of USB Type-C. The announced capabilities were:

Function	Specification
Video	Four HBR3 DisplayPort lanes, described by the consortium as "scalable for future needs"
Data	USB 3.1 Gen 2 (SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps), one channel of two lanes, for headset cameras and sensors
Power	Up to 27 watts
Connector	Single USB Type-C connector; the headset supplies its own cable

The main difference from the existing DisplayPort Alternate Mode was that VirtualLink carried full DisplayPort bandwidth and SuperSpeed USB data at the same time. NVIDIA's Turing white paper put it this way: VirtualLink "simultaneously supports four lanes of High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3) DisplayPort along with the SuperSpeed USB 3 link to the headset for motion tracking", whereas standard USB-C "only supports four lanes of HBR3 DisplayPort OR two lanes of HBR3 DisplayPort + two lanes SuperSpeed USB 3".

According to AnandTech, this was possible because of a change in version 1.3 of the USB Type-C cable specification. For direct-connect devices, which plug straight into the port with their own cable rather than through a hub or extender, an alternate mode could reconfigure the four USB 2.0 pins (A6, A7, B6 and B7) after the initial handshake. VirtualLink turned those pins into an extra high-speed differential pair, giving six high-speed lanes in total. Normal USB-C cables use unshielded twisted pairs for those pins, so a VirtualLink headset needed a cable with shielded pairs, which a headset maker could supply because the cable was part of the device.

Smith calculated that four HBR3 lanes matched the video bandwidth of a DisplayPort 1.4 connector, enough for 4K at 120 Hz with 8 bits per color channel, and more than double the bandwidth of the HDMI 1.3 links on the Rift and Vive. NVIDIA's Turing white paper noted that use of the VirtualLink connector required up to an additional 35 W of power that was not included in a card's TDP figure.

UploadVR's David Heaney, writing in 2019, reported further requirements: a minimum of 15 watts of power and 10 Gbit/s of USB data for the headset, a standards-compliant USB controller on VirtualLink GPUs, and a VR symbol beside each compliant port. He also wrote that the specification defined an adapter for PCs without the port, which needed DisplayPort, USB 3.0 and an AC power brick.

History

Announcement

The consortium announced VirtualLink on 17 July 2018 and published an "advance overview" for companies that wanted details ahead of the VirtualLink 1.0 specification. The press release quoted Jason Paul of NVIDIA, Nate Mitchell of Oculus, Pierre-Loup Griffais of Valve and Scott Evans of Microsoft; Evans said Microsoft had "been involved on VirtualLink from the beginning" and supported industry-standard approaches for "emerging Windows experiences including mixed reality". AnandTech described the announcement as essentially a call for participation, with no products named. The consortium's website asked companies that wanted the advance overview to register with a Google Group to receive it.

HTC Vive joined the consortium on 29 October 2018. The announcement quoted Rambod Jacoby, Chairman of the VirtualLink Consortium and a Principal Technologist at NVIDIA.

Graphics card support

NVIDIA announced its first Turing GPUs, the Quadro RTX professional cards, at SIGGRAPH on 13 August 2018 and listed hardware support for USB Type-C and VirtualLink among their features. A footnote explained that, ahead of the final standard, Turing GPUs implemented hardware support according to the "VirtualLink Advance Overview". The consumer GeForce RTX 20 series followed on 20 August 2018. NVIDIA said all of the cards included hardware support for VirtualLink, and its own Founders Edition cards were confirmed to have the USB-C port, while partner manufacturers chose their own port layouts.

Partner boards did not always include it. When the GeForce RTX 2060 launched in January 2019, UploadVR found that all but one of the announced partner cards lacked the port. It suggested the port might be mandatory only for the RTX 2070 and above. At the launch of the RTX 20 Super cards in July 2019 it counted seven partner RTX 2060 Super models with the port, while noting that the majority of cards still did not support VirtualLink. Road to VR later wrote that the Super cards had dropped the USB-C port carried by the first RTX 20 series cards.

Road to VR wrote in 2020 that, as far as it knew, AMD never added VirtualLink support to any of its GPUs despite being one of the consortium's backers. UploadVR noted in January 2019 that the Radeon VII lacked it, and in July 2019 that no AMD GPU on the market supported VirtualLink, including the Radeon RX 5700 XT. On 28 October 2020, after the standard had been abandoned, AMD announced the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT. AMD's own versions of the cards included a USB-C port, which AMD marketed as able to "power head-mounted displays with just one cable for a modern VR experience". Road to VR wrote that, as far as it knew, the port should allow VirtualLink devices to work.

Laptops were a separate problem. Road to VR reported in 2019 that all "GeForce RTX" certified laptops technically supported VirtualLink, but that not all of them wired their USB-C ports to the GPU, which the standard required. It added that, as far as it knew, no laptop maker clearly labelled VirtualLink-capable ports. In May 2019 Analogix announced a VirtualLink reference design for gaming notebook motherboards, built from its ANX7440, ANX7428, ANX7430 and ANX7411 chips, and said it would be available to buy by July 2019. It said the design could also be used in external accessories that connected older GPUs to VirtualLink headsets.

Headsets

Product	Maker	Use of VirtualLink
StarVR One	StarVR	A StarVR representative told UploadVR in December 2018 that the US$3,200 headset supported VirtualLink
XTAL (2020 generation)	VRgineers	Embedded VirtualLink cable manufactured by BizLink, introduced at CES 2020; VRgineers later made an adapter so the headset could use standard ports
Valve Index VirtualLink adapter	Valve	Optional US$40 adapter that would have replaced the DisplayPort, USB and power plugs on the Index cable with one USB-C plug; cancelled in 2019 and orders refunded

VRgineers called the XTAL "the world's first headset on the market to feature an embedded VirtualLink cable" and said VirtualLink-enabled systems like it needed a single cable "instead of as many six cables". UploadVR reported a price of US$7,890 including business support and noted at the time that VirtualLink had not yet been adopted in the consumer market.

Valve Index adapter cancellation

Valve offered the adapter as an optional accessory alongside the Index. In a note to customers reported by Road to VR on 3 August 2019, it cancelled the product, refunded customers who had ordered it and gave them US$20 in Steam credit. The note gave two reasons:

Foremost on that list is reliability. Our current testing indicates the VR connection may fail to establish in a reliable manner. Additionally, Virtual Link technology has not been widely adopted by manufacturers, laptops in particular (where a single connection could be the most beneficial), translating to very few PCs having viable ports for the connection.

Road to VR wrote that Valve did not say whether the reliability problem came from its own adapter design or from the VirtualLink protocol.

Abandonment

When NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 30 series on 1 September 2020, AnandTech's Ryan Smith wrote that VirtualLink ports were "on their way out", that the attempt to build a single-cable VR port "has fizzled", and that none of the three largest headset makers (Oculus, HTC and Valve) had used it, so the port would not return on the RTX 30 cards. Road to VR reported two days later that the official VirtualLink website had begun redirecting to Wikipedia around July 2020, and that consortium members had not answered its questions. VRgineers told the outlet that "the [VirtualLink] consortium has not operated for quite some time now", while calling VirtualLink "really reliable and convenient interface and communication protocol".

See also

• USB-C
• DisplayPort Alt Mode
• DisplayPort
• PC-Powered VR
• Valve Index
• VRgineers XTAL 8K