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Graphical glitching/jumping/stuttering in Half Life Alyx, anyone experiencing the same?

JetG
Explorer
Hi all,

just started playing Alyx and have noticed some terrible graphical jumping. The game looks incredible, but the immersion is really broken when the graphics glitch like this. Looking around seems fine most of the time, but head movement in 3d space causes the graphics to jump, as if it had lost a few frames (some tearing is present too, and some lateral movement of objects). Pretty sure it isn't a frame rate issue, but more a tracking issue or some error with the way Steam VR translates the data from the Rift maybe?

Anyone else experiencing a similiar issue with Alyx? It doesn't happen on Oculus games, nor have I noticed it with outher Steam VR games, seems something to do with the Rift and Alyx specifically. I've tried all the solutions I've found online regarding super sampling, disabling smoothing etc, but with little success. 

PC is a 3900X on a 570X, 1080ti, 32gb ram, original Rift with three cameras in a 10ft x 10ft space (mounted in the corners of the room). No tracking issues normally.

Any help would be gratefully received.

J
17 REPLIES 17

Anonymous
Not applicable
I am no help other than to say Alyx runs great on my end.
Have you tried lower graphics settings?

RuneSR2
Grand Champion
No problems here at all using GTX 1080 and i7 7700k, but I'm using the Valve Index. 

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

Anonymous
Not applicable

JetG said:

Hi all,

just started playing Alyx and have noticed some terrible graphical jumping. The game looks incredible, but the immersion is really broken when the graphics glitch like this. Looking around seems fine most of the time, but head movement in 3d space causes the graphics to jump, as if it had lost a few frames (some tearing is present too, and some lateral movement of objects). Pretty sure it isn't a frame rate issue, but more a tracking issue or some error with the way Steam VR translates the data from the Rift maybe?

Anyone else experiencing a similiar issue with Alyx? It doesn't happen on Oculus games, nor have I noticed it with outher Steam VR games, seems something to do with the Rift and Alyx specifically. I've tried all the solutions I've found online regarding super sampling, disabling smoothing etc, but with little success. 

PC is a 3900X on a 570X, 1080ti, 32gb ram, original Rift with three cameras in a 10ft x 10ft space (mounted in the corners of the room). No tracking issues normally.

Any help would be gratefully received.

J



I have a similar rig to yours with a 2060. I've had issues with odd freezes like that. I'm a flight sim guy and when this happens I'm also getting odd commands coming through my HOTAS that I'm not sending. But yeah it's just like that when it happens. A little pause like it's dropped frames. It skews my tracking momentarily too. Didn't seem to be an issue until I built this new PC that's only a month old. Was driving me nuts! Certainly not a horsepower thing. I started unplugging peripherals thinking I had something flaking out. Thought my USB hub was going bad, Nope! Problem persisted with nothing plugged in. So that ruled out a peripheral. Thought my brand new Seasonic PSU was maybe not right but like that happens with that brand. Off to google this. Got nothing but time like near everybody else these days!

Upon further review I read somewhere that if you are running certain monitoring programs like HWMonitor, AIDA64 or even MSI Afterburner It can cause conflicts with the Oculus software. Have fancy LED lights like I do in my pretty new rig? Well..apparently their programs, like the iCue I'm using, also tend to interfere with the Oculus software. Anything that is tied in to low level processes including motherboard lighting---like the Asus Aura my board has will make it glitch out. While I did run AIDA64 and AB in the background of my other PC, I didn't recall having this level of problem. But I didn't have any LED stuff on that one as it was kinda ancient c2011. So not sure if this would have happened all along if I'd had LED control going on in my old PC or if this is another feature from another oculus update.

So..I went into the task manager and started disabling things one at a time. Went into a flight sim and just sat on the runway and waited for the glitch to happen. Sure enough It persisted just sitting there with my hands on the desk until I nuked almost all of those programs. AIDA64 was a central player here as some of the things that AB was monitoring got pulled from AIDA64.Can't say it's completely cured as I was really reluctant to kill off iCue completely as I have a Corsair CPU cooler and it's run thru iCue. But with the other programs killed the glitches are almost down to none as opposed to every couple of minutes or every few seconds at random.

Hope this gives you a clue as to what might be going on. Had me scratching my head!

JetG
Explorer
Hi guys, thanks for replying. I put in a solid session last night, and just tried to ignore the glitching, but man it is annoying. Looking around online and it does seem like a Rift / Rift S to Steam VR issue, and it seems to be software related, not hardware (someone with a 9900K and a 2080ti was reporting the same issue). I have a G-Sync monitor so I tried disabling that incase there was something happening between the graphic drivers and Steam VR.....I felt like it might have helped a little bit but the still problem persists. I'll try fiddling with the in game video options and report back. I have a pretty minimialist PC with not many things running in the background (razer synapse, icue for the keyboard and AMD raid xpert 2), but these have never created problems before. Worth noting as well that I have a Inateck USB interface as well running a few of the sensors. Again, if it was hardware related it would happen on all games one would imagine.

I studied the problem more ernestly last night, the best way to describe it is a 'flash' where 3D objects or the world will flash to a different (but close) location then flash back to correct position/location in an instant. Like a very quick loss or change in headset location then back to correct tracking. Definately doesn't happen where you are just looking around or rotating the headset on a fixed axis. The latest nvidia drivers seemed to help a little bit as well....although I don't know, along with the disabling of g-sync, if this is just psychosomantic.




JetG
Explorer
Tried everything I could to fix it, no success. I can only think that it is a glitch between my combination of hardware/software and Alyx. Hopefully updates will be released at some stage, either by nvidia, steam or Oculus. It is still playable and immersive, but man is it annoying. If anyone stumbles across this post and has an aswer, I'd love to hear from you!

I may even contact steam and oculus support, see if they can weigh in on the matter.

J

Fullyverified
Honored Guest
Hey JetG, just wondering if you ever found a solution to this problem? I currently experiencing it and haven't been able to find reference to it any where else.

bpaul1983
Honored Guest
I got my Oculus Rift S last week, started playing Half Life Alyx last night and am getting the same issues described in this thread. I don't have any RGB lighting or anything like that running, except on my Steelseries Apex Pro keyboard. I have no issues in other VR games, although so far I have only played Pistol Whip and Superhot VR and those run great. 

I'm running an i5 9400F, RTX 2060 6GB, and 16GB RAM - should be fine specs-wise, right? 

Anonymous
Not applicable
Lots of people are reporting this kind of poor performance in Alyx, whereas it played pretty smooth at launch. Something got screwed up either in a Steam update, SteamVR update, or Alyx update. The theory is that it is caused by the way, by default, the game attempts to scale fidelity dynamically depending on GPU load. Apparently when it adjusts fidelity it is causing loss of frames. The solution is to fix the fidelity level to a specific number at launch. So try this:

Right click the game in your Steam library, then go to "properties" and "set launch options". Paste the following:

-novid -console -vconsole +vr_fidelity_level_auto 0 +vr_fidelity_level 3 +vr_render_scale 1.15


If that fixes your problem then you can increase the fidelity level
(fidelity_level 4, 5, etc... up to 😎 up until performance suffers.

VROne3D
Explorer
Has anyone overclocked their RAM or CPU?... out of curiosity. So, did you build the PC yourself.