Colt

Thank you! That was an good idea! I disabled the Turbo boost and confirmed first the clock would stay fixed at 3.5Ghz. Interestingly it did had an effect in HL:Alyx, the problem got worse, confirming CPU speed was at least a factor. I then proceeded the opposite way and overclocked the i7-4770K (since I already had installed a very strong cooler), and the studdering problem diminished - but was still present. Over the week-end, I got my hands on a GTX1660 and swap out the RTX2070 for the GTX. I was hoping this would work - but it didn't. Maybe the root cause is deeper.. but who knows. Nonetheless, I also received the new parts and now I have an Asus Z390-E Gaming with an i5-9600k. With the RTX2070, the issue has fully disappeared! HL:Alyx with HTC Vive Wireless is very sharp and fluid - everything at ULTRA! I spent a lot of time trying to interpret the Bottleneck calculator of pc-builds.com, since they make interesting claims on matching different generations of hardware. I could not confirm their math (the community seems to have quite on debate on it to say the least) but in a way - I can see the logic behind it. One piece of hardware can consume so much bandwith that in theory could make other pieces wait longer. If it were back in the 90s I would check the IRQ conflicts - but that is from a time long past. To solve this, I think a performance monitor tool of PCIe Lanes would be the next step - but I've never seen any such tools. More research would be key here. Anyway - Thanks a lot for responding, since my new machine does not have the issue, i'll be enjoying the game for a while, rather than troubleshooting. Thanks!

I started having the exact same issue a week ago... Started playing HL: Alyx and noticed it right away on the balcony regardeless of LOW to ULTRA settings. Reading this thread - interestingly I too have a i7-4770k mixed with a new RTX 2070. Intel i7-4770K, Asus Z87-PLUS, 16GB Ram, SSD, Asus RTX 2070. - HTC VIVE Original + HTC Wireless Adapter. The clue here to me is: I did not have this issue when using my previous GTX 1070, but I recently upgraded to an RTX 2070 and issues started. Now like everyone's graph, I have studdering every few seconds with spikes (blurring the image for a sec) ONLY with the wireless adapter. With the vive cable no issue. Could be a coincidence with a software/driver release... but if not - i'm currently leaning towards the CPU/Chipset not being fast enough to keep up with the demand of the RTX 2070, creating a bottleneck that affects performance on other PCIe cards.. namely in this case the PCIe WiGig card. I tried moving the cards around to ensure they don't use shared PCIe slots - but same result like in this thread - no changes. I'll be switching to a Z390 + i5-9600k, will post an update.. in the meantime, I would recommend (if you can), trying to downgrade the RTX to a GTX and see if that solves the studdering issue?! - just an educated guess for a test.