Constant wireless issues

[ayfkm]

 I have an early Vive - I preordered.  I also preordered the HTC wireless adapter. When I first got the wireless adapter it was nearly useless. I gave up on the Vive entirely for a month or two because I was so frustrated. The thing just couldn't maintain a link - constant gray-outs that wouldn't self-recover. 

When I decided to give it another shot, there was a firmware update for the wireless receiver, and when I applied that, things were great for about a year. I was very happy with the system.

A little after Christmas this year, after another spate of updates, the adapter started dropping out randomly - the actual Vive headset would apparently lose power completely, while the wireless adapter remained powered (green light on the adapter, no light at all on the headset, and games would not show any tracking - I could move the headset around and the external monitor did not show motion). 

The only fix was to unplug the battery, wait for the controllers and battery to turn off, and then plug it back in again and wait for everything to reconnect. 

Some nights this happened every 3 minutes to the point where I'd just give up. Other nights I could play for hours with no issues. I was never able to determine any rhyme or reason for this. 

I contacted HTC support, went through their troubleshooting hoops, and was told to send the adapter in for service. I received no feedback, was told there'd be a $120 fee for unspecified "repairs" that were never described, and a week or two later received an adapter back. It had the same problems but seemed even worse. I sent it back, got escalated, and the escalation point of contact didn't tell me anything about what was done either. When I repeatedly asked what problem was found the only answer I got was that they were sending me a refurbished adapter.  This one still has the same issues, except it ALSO refuses to power up using the official HTC battery - only my no-name Best Buy 20,000 mAh battery works (for brief periods). 

My PC was fairly old - an i7-3820 on an Asus X79 FTW board with a pretty ancient USB3 subsystem that would make weird "device disconnected/device reconnected" noises back and forth for a few minutes after starting steamvr, so since HTC support had been useless, I just built a new machine with a Ryzen 3700x, 16GB DDR4, on an Asus Prime X570-P board. The only shared components between the two systems are the SSD and GPU - an Asus GTX970. Nothing is overclocked or tweaked from defaults in any way.

This still has the same issues. I can't use the original HTC battery, and some nights the thing works great for hours, while other nights it's just hot garbage. 

Tonight there was another firmware update for the wireless receiver - the third or fourth one in the last two weeks, I might add - and now, on the rare occasions when I can actually play something for ten minutes, the wireless adapter seems to occasionally just lose its mind and can't maintain a decent link. Everything becomes unreadably pixelated and drops to maybe 5fps.

This happened tonight when I was trying to get through the "Jeff" section in HL: Alyx and I managed to smash my hand into the wall so hard I think I sprained my wrist, because I was trying not to die and the FPS dropped so badly that the boundary fence didn't show up until too late. Out of two hours of screwing around I think I was in-game for maybe 40 minutes.

I emailed HTC support 8 days ago and have received zero response of any kind. I emailed them again today (both times using the contact us form on the HTC Vive support site), nothing. I did notice they've raised the price for the wireless adapter since I bought it, though, which is hilarious.

I am **SO FURIOUS**. I've spent absurd amounts of money on this thing and I'm ready to chuck it in the trash and order a Quest and a link cable.  

Things I have tried: 

- nuke and reinstall Vive wireless software & drivers as well as SteamVR and Steam itself

- complete, clean reinstall of Windows at the time of the new system build, resulting in another clean install of the above

- completely disabled the exterior camera in SteamVR settings

- Forced PCIe 3.0 from motherboard BIOS and using the Vive Wireless utility 

- Enabled direct mode rendering

- Set controllers to never turn off in power management settings

- Tried with and without motion smoothing enabled

The last four items were based on reading various threads related to the same problem on the Vive forums or the Steam forums.

The wireless adapter always shows perfect signal strength. 

 

Can someone please help me understand what might be the problem before I actually, literally light this thing on fire?  I'm down with any kind of troubleshooting short of decapping a chip and using a signal analyzer or something - I am an IT professional, I'm not afraid of parsing log files or futzing with weird registry settings. 

The thing is so great when it works. But at this point I'm ready to give up.

[Onassis]

On 4/28/2020 at 2:16 PM, ayfkm said:

 I have an early Vive - I preordered.  I also preordered the HTC wireless adapter. When I first got the wireless adapter it was nearly useless. I gave up on the Vive entirely for a month or two because I was so frustrated. The thing just couldn't maintain a link - constant gray-outs that wouldn't self-recover. 

When I decided to give it another shot, there was a firmware update for the wireless receiver, and when I applied that, things were great for about a year. I was very happy with the system.

A little after Christmas this year, after another spate of updates, the adapter started dropping out randomly - the actual Vive headset would apparently lose power completely, while the wireless adapter remained powered (green light on the adapter, no light at all on the headset, and games would not show any tracking - I could move the headset around and the external monitor did not show motion). 

The only fix was to unplug the battery, wait for the controllers and battery to turn off, and then plug it back in again and wait for everything to reconnect. 

Some nights this happened every 3 minutes to the point where I'd just give up. Other nights I could play for hours with no issues. I was never able to determine any rhyme or reason for this. 

I contacted HTC support, went through their troubleshooting hoops, and was told to send the adapter in for service. I received no feedback, was told there'd be a $120 fee for unspecified "repairs" that were never described, and a week or two later received an adapter back. It had the same problems but seemed even worse. I sent it back, got escalated, and the escalation point of contact didn't tell me anything about what was done either. When I repeatedly asked what problem was found the only answer I got was that they were sending me a refurbished adapter.  This one still has the same issues, except it ALSO refuses to power up using the official HTC battery - only my no-name Best Buy 20,000 mAh battery works (for brief periods). 

My PC was fairly old - an i7-3820 on an Asus X79 FTW board with a pretty ancient USB3 subsystem that would make weird "device disconnected/device reconnected" noises back and forth for a few minutes after starting steamvr, so since HTC support had been useless, I just built a new machine with a Ryzen 3700x, 16GB DDR4, on an Asus Prime X570-P board. The only shared components between the two systems are the SSD and GPU - an Asus GTX970. Nothing is overclocked or tweaked from defaults in any way.

This still has the same issues. I can't use the original HTC battery, and some nights the thing works great for hours, while other nights it's just hot garbage. 

Tonight there was another firmware update for the wireless receiver - the third or fourth one in the last two weeks, I might add - and now, on the rare occasions when I can actually play something for ten minutes, the wireless adapter seems to occasionally just lose its mind and can't maintain a decent link. Everything becomes unreadably pixelated and drops to maybe 5fps.

This happened tonight when I was trying to get through the "Jeff" section in HL: Alyx and I managed to smash my hand into the wall so hard I think I sprained my wrist, because I was trying not to die and the FPS dropped so badly that the boundary fence didn't show up until too late. Out of two hours of screwing around I think I was in-game for maybe 40 minutes.

I emailed HTC support 8 days ago and have received zero response of any kind. I emailed them again today (both times using the contact us form on the HTC Vive support site), nothing. I did notice they've raised the price for the wireless adapter since I bought it, though, which is hilarious.

I am **SO FURIOUS**. I've spent absurd amounts of money on this thing and I'm ready to chuck it in the trash and order a Quest and a link cable.  

Things I have tried: 

- nuke and reinstall Vive wireless software & drivers as well as SteamVR and Steam itself

- complete, clean reinstall of Windows at the time of the new system build, resulting in another clean install of the above

- completely disabled the exterior camera in SteamVR settings

- Forced PCIe 3.0 from motherboard BIOS and using the Vive Wireless utility 

- Enabled direct mode rendering

- Set controllers to never turn off in power management settings

- Tried with and without motion smoothing enabled

The last four items were based on reading various threads related to the same problem on the Vive forums or the Steam forums.

The wireless adapter always shows perfect signal strength. 

 

Can someone please help me understand what might be the problem before I actually, literally light this thing on fire?  I'm down with any kind of troubleshooting short of decapping a chip and using a signal analyzer or something - I am an IT professional, I'm not afraid of parsing log files or futzing with weird registry settings. 

The thing is so great when it works. But at this point I'm ready to give up.

 

[TruthCannon]

Firstly, I really appreciate the long post because I'm going through the same thing. I have some conclusion for you.

* 90% of the issues are resolved with a top end CPU.

* All the small adjustments that can be made to enhance fps, most don't work, certainly things like power cables don't work. A better GPU is the easiest best thing for this.

* However, it's an imperfect tech, and you will apparently get drop outs occasionally, it's just part of the deal. I'm not saying it's fine to be this way, it's just how it is and there's nothing we can do to change that right now - it would seem. I've also tried everything suggested on the internet and it's vastly snake oil.

The only thing I can think of is if there is radio interference causing drop outs, though I've tried this in a pretty isolated environment so I have my doubts.

When this works though, it is absolutely worth it. For the moment I can deal with infrequent dropouts (i.e. some sessions are entirely fine, some experience brief drop outs, some experience a disconnect).

I will add though, this mod absolutely reduces temperatures and thus stability.

[Electron]

Same thing here and me too I just want light this thing on fire because vive doesn't care about the wireless adaptatern there isnt any firmware update since...wow... at least 18 months ?

And sorry but no, it's not a problem related to a low or high end CPU :

 

My Spec :

Intel B360 a pro

i7 9700KF

RTX 2080 S

16Gb RAM

The i7 9700kf is a high end CPU and 2080 S too

On my side, I'm suspecting dark problems with the communication with the motherboard where Vive doesn't want take care about it and like @TruthCannonsaid "it's an imperfect tech".

 

I'm tired to try the mod with the fan on the adaptater because I have the air conditioner just above my head (3meters away) and I'm thinking it's not really the problem.

So I have found anything about my problem in spite of have seen a lot of thread with a lot of users with th same problem but without solution so goodbye Vive and your damn support

[brunopato]

Weird thing that HTC don't know about their own stuff. Some time ago I reached them via chat and after doing some tests and sending them some logs they asked me to send my equipment, as they told me that my equipment had an issue. Question is I'm from Brazil and it would take lots of time to send it and have it back. So I started an investigation and saw that lots of people were having the same issue as me.

I tried everything. Formated my PC, unplugged all USB PCI-e cards, my AVerMedia card - which I'm still not using as I still don't have a mirrorless camera and I'm still using my Logitech Brio - installed fans on the top of vive wireless, switched the WiGig card to every free slot and I still kept having the disconnection issue. I started messing with everything that was possible, even disabling the anti virus and everything you can't even imagine - for months - and nothing worked.

Then I searched for the folder in which the exe to start vive wireless is found. There are some extra exe files over there and I started running every each of them. Then I found a file called PCIeGenConfig.exe. I ran it and it opened a window with an option to enable PCIeGen setting. And then... ta-daaaaah! My disconnection issue was simply gone!!! It seems the WiGig card has some problems regarding the PCI-e gen from some motherboards, and that's what I'm talking about when I told you that it seems HTC doesn't know about their own stuff.

Lots of people struggling to maintain connection with their Vive headsets, and it can be simply resolved by running this exe and enabling this PCIeGen thing. The weirdest thing is that when I searched on Google for this exe file I found only 2 pages mentioning it! That gives me the creeps! It's a simple fix that even HTC doesn't have a clue about! It would be good if you could report my case to them, as they could just give people this instruction instead of asking guys to send them their equipment that's actually in good shape! End of story lol with a happy ending! I hope my experience and resolutions can help more people that are suffering because of the lack of knowledge of a company that doesn't understand their own devices! Regards from Brazil!