Wireless gray screens and reproducible compression artifacting

[MrDamm]

There's two problems that a lot of people have with the wireless: gray screen crashes, and compression artifacts.  I'd like to bring the issue up again and see if Vive has any new information.

 

1) Gray Screen Crashes

 

Many users report intermittent gray screens, occuring anywhere from once per 10 minutes to several hours.  The screen will go gray, but the game does not crash, and you can still hear audio, use the microphone, and controller buttons register properly.  The video will not come back unless you power cycle the wireless by disconnecting the battery (works half the time), or by completely shutting down the Vive and restarting SteamVR (works 100%).  You can then play without issue again, until it crashes again 10 minutes to 4 hours later.

It can happen in any game, at any time.

 

Some users believe these crashes are heat related, and have installed USB fans to keep temps low.  Others have had no success from cooling the unit better.

 

Things I've tried:

• SteamVR beta and non-beta
• Complete reinstallation of Windows and everything Vive related
• Replacement of USB cable from battery to wireless
• Replacement of Wireless adapter with a new one

2) Reproducible compression artifacts

 

Certain scenes in a game will always render with compression artifacts, regardless of if the CPU/GPU are being taxed.

For example, any scene with lots of foliage or alpha textures (like a chain-link fence) will appear very pixellated, the same kind of compression artifacts you get when the CPU can't keep up at a proper quality, or if the signal is poor.

You can very easily reproduce this in a game like SkyrimVR.  Find a place with lots of grass or bushes, and the image will be pixellated.  This happens even if your computer has tons of headroom and is otherwise rendering the scene with no issue.  For example, I can find a spot in SkyrimVR where my GPU is only at 60% capacity, and the CPU is at 20%, but it is a pixellated mess (but otherwise running fine at well under 11ms frametime).  It's almost as if the WiGig card doesn't know how to properly compress certain scenes.

 

 

My specs (two computers where both these issues happen):

1) 8700k@5ghz, 16GB 3200mhz RAM, 1080 GPU, Windows 10, Vive Pro

2) 6700k@4.6ghz, 16GB 2600mhz RAM, 1070 GPU, Windows 10, regular Vive

 

Thanks for any input you may have, let me know if additional details would help.

[MrDamm]

Bump

[MrDamm]

Bump...

[Synthesis]

 

If you haven't already tried moving your wireless card to a different PCIe slot, do that. If you have, check in your BIOS and make sure that PCIe 3.0 is enabled. That's helped some users affected by this issue.

Thank you,

-John C

[MrDamm]

Hi John, thanks for the reply.

I have indeed tried all my PCIe slots (both the 1x and 16x slots on my board), and made sure it was running at 3.0.   Didn't seem to make a difference with the crashing or performance.  The only other thing in the PCIe slots is my GPU.  The motherboard is the Asus Z370 Tuf Pro-gaming