Half Life Alyx Vr , Pimax results and troubleshooting

No, it appears that is not working properly for anyone. Will have to wait, but it’s not too bad to physically turn.

Back to the game… it’s is soooooo good. Definitely one hell of an experience and it makes owning a Pimax absolutely worth every penny. The detail in the gloves is astounding. :open_mouth:

yea, same here. I hate it but will ignore until the community demands a hotfix. This game is incredible.

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finally a AAA experience. You know it’s good when we are gobsmacked by the immersion even after owning a 5K/8K for a year.

Thanks for the tip on restarting pitool and HMD after PP turned on…no more graphic tearing on the right side now.

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Well… PP with large FOV give a strongly bad resolution. Only works with Medium FOV :tired_face:

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That opening sequence! :open_mouth: :open_mouth: :open_mouth:

Anyone getting dialogue out of sync with lip?
Btw, latest driver makes huge improvement.

Just to be specific: There’s snap turning (degrees can be set in menu) but sadly no smooth turning.

Wireless would eliminate that problem for me. Playing Half-Life 1 from start to finish on the Quest was soooo awesome because of that.

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Yeah lamda1vr is pretty incredible on the quest, one of my top experiences.

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Played around a bit yesterday, looks really good… Got the same blood clipping as everybody else, so will try with PP later this week.

But I was just wondering, I’ve been using the following settings (basically settings for DCS), images look crisp and getting close to 90fps all the time, but can I improve things visually?

  • Pitool: 2
  • HL-A visuals: High
    in vrsettings file:
  • “maxRecommendedResolution”:3852 (I’ve got a 2026 5K+)
  • “supersampleScale”:0.25

RTX2080Ti 11GB
i7-9700K
16GB ram

Or should I go to “maxRecommendedResolution”:16384 and Pitool = …what?

Testing time is limited to find out myself unfortunately so if anyone has any suggestions, please share.

I will repeat myself here from another post:

  1. Enable Parallel Projection.

  2. Disable FFR (only use if you need the extra frame rate, preferably Conservative mode)

  3. Contrast +2, Brightness -2 in PiTool for better visuals.

  4. Does the game run in a low resolution? You need to increase the maxRecommendedResolution. With default 4096, the Pimax 8KX and 8K+ (even 5K+) looks low-resolution as soon as you turn on PP or Large FOV. With 16384 you get full sharpness on Normal and Large FOV with PP enabled. The config file in use can be found in 2 different locations. Only one of them is used by Steam, but add the vale to both, just in case:
    "C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\openvr\steamvr.vrsettings"
    or
    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\config\steamvr.vrsettings"
    Just add this line and restart SteamVR:
    maxRecommendedResolution

  5. Start the game with settings on Ultra, decrease if needed for extra performance.

  6. Running with 8K+ and 8KX, you will need a RTX 2080 or 2080Ti for best experience. The game has dynamic resolution, so if you run low on performance, the game will decrease the resolution automatically and it will look bad.

  7. Update to latest Nvidia drivers 445.75 (improves HL Alyx performance and more).

  8. Keep PiTool render quality at 1.0 and lower the SteamVR SS if needed.

  9. As always (applies to all VR games), in Nvidia control panel:

  • Power Management Mode: Prefer maximum performance
  • Virtual Reality Pre-rendered frames: 2 (or 3) is better than 1.
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I tried the above settings this morning and personally saw a big improvement - thanks👍 (milage may vary)

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When you say the game run in a low resolution are you talking about how it pixelates as i tried to describe here?

https://community.openmr.ai/t/hl-alyx-performance-optimization/26564/9

Unfortunately, that’s dated advice. Due to thermal throttling, Adaptive or Optimal Power can actually provide higher overall performance. Which is actually better depends on your GPU.

https://community.openmr.ai/t/not-hitting-120fps-nor-using-more-than-60-70-of-gpu/26047/5?u=neal_white_iii

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The pixelization is caused by the built-in adaptive/dynamic resolution in HL Alyx.
The low resolution (point 3), I refer to the resolution cap by SteamVR (max RecommendedResolution default at 4096). It just looks blurry and low definition. Not really pixelerated, but not sharp and lots of jaggies.

Interesting, thanks! On my 2080Ti, I can barely hit 2020Mhz boost with Optimal Power, while Maximum Performance brings it to 2055 at most. But then I always have the fans on at least 65% when gaming and overclocking, so the thermals are never an issue.

For me I ‘think’ it was caused by FFR. Took your advice and turned it off (in pitool). After a full restart I turned the HL Alyx in game graphics setting UP to ultra and it never returned, maybe multiple causes?

Thats interesting, thanks. I have to test more with FFR enabled.

When I was running FFR off, PP enabled and SteamVR SS 100% (resolution beyond 4400 pixels horizontally on 8KX, before I turned it down to 76% which renders roughtly 3800 horizontally) I got framedrops and saw the in-game resolution instantly being decreased, so I assumed it was only the dynamic/adaptive resolution feature which kicked in. But indeed, maybe its more apparent when having FFR enabled.

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For me the results were both counter intuitive and confusing.

When I first played I noticed some minor pixelation and it got much worse the further I went through Chapter one (sounds similar to the built-in adaptive/dynamic resolution you mention above) . I went to turn down the in game graphics setting and it had already auto detected to the very lowest). Thought I was in real trouble and my RTX 2020 wouldn’t be able to run it - however others were saying how well it ran on Ultra.

Then I read your post about turning FFR off, PP on, adding a line to the Steam config file. Did those, full restart, turned in game settings up to Ultra and the issue never returned. I played from the start again about 4 hours yesterday and its been rock solid - I definatedly no longer see any form of ‘built-in adaptive/dynamic resolution’. It’s possible I’ve accidentally turned that feature off and/or I’m getting frame drops which I’m just not sensitive to it.

If you would like me to check any of my settings / run any tests feel free to ask :+1:

Have not yet tested Alyx yet (just about to clear a large space), but I certainly hope Parallel Projections will not be needed! It is a huge waste of GPU performance that the industry really should put a stop to.

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It’s ‘playable’, but the issues it causes are immersion breaking so you’ll probably want to leave PP on.

Hopefully this is patched, I worry that this will be in the Source 2 SDK, so all mods using this will also need PP enabled to run.

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While digging through the config files(looking for a setting to disable dynamic resolution), I came across “video.txt”. I’m not sure if this file affects the render resolution(being a text file), but it also has it’s own "“setting.r_texture_stream_max_resolution” entry which has a default value of 4096.

Has anyone else come across/experimented with modifying this?