With Steam Link on a Quest 2, third-party overlays (I use WayVR for desktop screens) look low-resolution and shimmery while a game is running. The moment I open the SteamVR dashboard they become perfectly sharp, and they go soft again when I close it. No setting I've tried changes this: overlay render quality, encoded video width, or the overlay app's own options.

In the Steam Link detailed debug view, opening the dashboard consistently does two things: nLayerCount goes from 2 to 1, and the bitrate drops (about 267 Mbps to roughly 100). Closing it reverses both immediately.

So it looks like Steam Link streams differently while the dashboard is up, in a way that makes overlays much clearer. Could a Valve developer confirm what changes there?

My request: please make that behaviour controllable, either as a setting or through an API that overlay apps can call. Then an overlay like WayVR could ask for it only while its screens are showing, instead of users opening the dashboard just to read text.

OS: CachyOS (Arch-based), kernel 7.2.9-1-cachyos
Desktop: KDE Plasma 6.7.5, Wayland
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3080, driver 615.71.09 (open kernel module)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D
SteamVR: 2.17.10 (build 25330290), native Linux
Steam client build: 1788652215
Headset: Quest 2, Steam Link client 2.0.24.2395
Stream: 90 Hz, encode width 832 (hw max 1344), 10-bit
Overlay: WayVR 26.8.0 (OpenVR backend)