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.
