Forum Discussion

Swayne_Gretzky's avatar
Swayne_Gretzky
Explorer
6 years ago

Half-Life Alyx buggy hand motion and suttering

I bought a Rift S to play HL Alyx and have been having tons of issues. I'm using FPS VR on Steam to track my performance statistics and for the most part it looks good, GPU and CPU frame times are low and performance is a solid 80 frames but my hands will look stuttery in certain parts of the game. I could be looking near a corner of a wall, good frames, stuttery hads, then back up 2 feet in game but physically in same spot and the hand movement is better. 
 
It seems this game has some pretty serious software glitches right now, I don't have any problems playing Robo Recall or Superhot but it is not stop jankyness playing HL Alyx beyond chapter 3. I set Oculus settings to prioritize performance and Steam VR resolution to 70%, seems like my PC should run the game 0 problems at those settings but it still has issues and I have done enough troubleshooting at this point to say it's a problem with Alyx not my hardware. 

i5 9600k - tried at factory clock, OC of 4.6ghz and OC of 4.9ghz, similar performance at every setting
1080ti stock clock - latest drivers installed with DDU, have tried rolling back to Alyx release drivers with same issues
16gb ram - dual channel, tried at stock clock and 3200, problems persist
1tb Samsung 970 Evo m.2 SSD - 160+gb free, have verified game files, reinstalled Alyx, Steam VR and Oculus software, no fix
850 watt PSU that is brand new and hasn't given me any issues
Playing with all non essential background software closed. 

I have tried using Oculus Tray Tool with ASW on and off, issues persist
In Steam VR I have disable advanced supersampling filter 
Game settings all on low

I've all but given up on playing this game smoothly. It seems to be pretty solid in the first 3 chapters but there are occasional CPU spikes in FPS VR and it becomes more noticeable later in the game. Doesn't make any sense at this point and I can't think of any more troubleshooting I could do :(

16 Replies

  • Swayne_Gretzky's avatar
    Swayne_Gretzky
    Explorer
    6 years ago
    Yes, I posted this same message on there, hoping to find someone who has resolved the issue. Was just playing, pretty smooth most of the time but again there are the occasional hand stutters and I a few random CPU spikes that create a stutter. There was a part where an enemy busted down a door and it gave a cpu spike accompanied by stutter, quite immersion breaking especially for a game like Half Life. 
  • Pixie40's avatar
    Pixie40
    Expert Trustee
    6 years ago
    Er, I haven't seen anything like this. I have a Intel i5-8400 cpu and a pair of Radeon RX 580 in Crossfire mode. While the AMD gpu management software claims this is below required specs for Steam VR, it plays all my Steam VR games just fine, including Half-Life Alyx. Your GPU and CPU should be good enough, but I'm wondering... Are you playing on a desktop or a laptop? Because the 1080ti laptop card is apparently not as powerful as the 1080ti desktop card.

  • Swayne_Gretzky's avatar
    Swayne_Gretzky
    Explorer
    6 years ago
    Desktop. I'm using continuous locomotion and the slight stutters are very noticeable and somewhat random when walking around. There are times where it will go a while without a stutter but surely enough there are always spots that cause CPU spikes in FPS VR. I'm considering pirating an older patch version of the game and testing that but I really don't want to go that far.
  • Pixie40's avatar
    Pixie40
    Expert Trustee
    6 years ago
    Uh, could the spikes be caused by you running FPS VR along side the game? I don't know... As I said, I'm not experiencing this problem.
  • Swayne_Gretzky's avatar
    Swayne_Gretzky
    Explorer
    6 years ago
    No, I closed FPS VR and still get the spikes. I have been trying to troubleshoot these issues for a while now, they occurred well before I had FPS VR, using FPS VR allowed me to see it does have irregular spikes in the CPU ms timing. Normally my CPU time is around 3.5 ms, which is really good but occasionally it will spike to 25-50ms for just 1 frame causing a stutter. The slight hand tracking thing happens even when FPS VR reports good timings on GPU and CPU. 

    This is the only game I have had these issues with.
  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    6 years ago
    I had these issues a week or two ago, just after a SteamVR update. Then it had another update soon afterwards and it was all sorted. I did think it was my CPU and GPU overstock that I had just done that was causing the issue but I brought everything down to stock levels and I still had the problem.

    There was another update yesterday so maybe that's re-broken things again?

    I've uninstalled the game now so can't check if I'm having issues again.


  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    6 years ago
    There's just been another couple of updates to Steam again tonight so you might want to give Half Life Alyx another go and see if those updates have fixed things.
  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    6 years ago
    If you look on the Steam forum for this game you will see that lots of people have this problem. No one can figure out the issue but it didn't exist at launch. Something got updated either with SteamVr, the game, windows, or maybe video drivers but unfortunately it is very broken for alot of people.

    One good fix is : 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 8) up until performance suffers. This gives me perfect performance.

    Another possible option is to go into the games settings and change the engine to Vulkan. Make sure and restart the game. People get mixed results with this.

    Finally I would play with the motion smoothing options in SteamVR. You will definitely notice a difference, for better or worse.


  • Swayne_Gretzky's avatar
    Swayne_Gretzky
    Explorer
    6 years ago
    I have tried every tweak under and above the sea. Fresh boot, no OC, stable OC, ddu, various drivers, hpet timers, bios updated, every bios setting, upgraded ram to 32gb, nothing is fixing the problem. 

    I can run benchmarks on my PC and get great results, all of my games run great I am just experiencing these issues with Alyx, any maybe some issues in Asgard's Wrath but that's a whole different ordeal. 

    I beat Alyx with the stutter, I will keep trying to troubleshoot it and hopefully get some performance graphics sent to devs or something because this is driving me crazy. I was super hyped for VR and it's the buggiest time I've ever had on my PC and it's strapped to my face... come on devs you can't let these game breaking performance issues persist, painful experience. 
    • AleksCore's avatar
      AleksCore
      Explorer
      3 years ago

      I know this message was posted in 2020 and now 2023 but I have a solutiong for buggy hand motion. Change fog quality to Low and it'll be butter smooth. Also you should know for some reason it takes around 1 minute for this setting to apply fully and then hand movement very very smooth. Any higher setting make it bad for me.

      My PC: i7-13700KF, RTX 4080, 32 Gb DDR4