Black Screen in Vive.

[Thornton]

i7 5820k with 980ti.
Steam VR runs. Green light on headset and VR showing everything connected and working fine.

Display mirrors to desktop as normal.

But the display in the vive remains black. And not working but showing a black screen. Just no display at all. so when you put on the headset all you see is darkness

Old machine. i7 930 with 770 4gb.
Everything works fine. HMD fires up with no issues
Using the same display types (DVI to monitor and HDMI to breakout box and the same cables. Works on the old machine.
Doesn't work on the new "VR ready" machine.

Tried every usb port on new machine. Uninstalled and resintalled several times.

[Moggle69]

Exact problem with my 980ti... everything hooked up great, but once I was about to set up the room scale, it tells me to put on the HMD, but the display on the HMD is blank. Dead... no light, no image. The light on the display is green. I also tried everything, but nothing works.

How many monitors are hooked up to your GPU?

[Moggle69]

I tried everything, but I read that some had this problem with multi-monitor setups. I am also running 3 monitors. I will try to disconnect 2 monitors and run a single monitor only and report back the results.

I also heard of the HDMI cable coming loose from the HMD, so I will check that as well.

[Thornton]

just the single monitor for me. I've read a lot of fixes. And a lot of people who suddently got it to work with no real idea why.
In my case it works fine on one and not on the other.
I've just got new cables and will flush all evidence of the vive from my new system, clear the usb drivers and start the setup from scratch with a display port to mini display port. If that doesn't work I've also got a hdmi to mini display port

[MyDream]

Did your lighthouse go on standby? I had this problem with our VR conversion tool, Swift. Vive was a black screen and everything else was ok. When customers restarted the lighthouse, things worked. It might be that some apps trigger standby or sometimes lighthouse starts on standby and it needs to be activated.

[Speedbreaker12]

I'm running 3 Monitors and the vive and I sometimes get that, usually a steam vr restart works.

[Thornton]

ok got mine running using the display port (gpu) to mini display port (link box). Prior to that i wiped all usb drivers using steamVR, settings, develeloped. deleted all instances of vive and steam vr from my system. and started setup from scratch.
At first the headset wouldn't recognise and caused a failure in steamVR.
Restarting comp fixed that. But now i cant get audio to the headset. Luckily i have a very long headphone cable and extensions for it.
At least it is working to an extent

[david.qktc0]

I have a similar problem. All lights are green. Tracking is perfect in mirror screen but headset is dark. I have a pair of MSI GTX 970s on an x99 MB with a 6 core i7. I initially had the left eye working (right eye was dark). I removed everything vive related and reinstalled but now dont see anything lol. I think we are at the bleeding edge of VR at the moment. I have installed and reinstalled. All drivers appear to be fine. All devices appear installed. I get no error messages from Steam VR or windows. Not sure what to do next.

[Thornton]

Using a mini display port (breakout box) to display port (GPU) The screen came back to life. However I had no audio. Undaunted and having a extra long headset lead I moved the entire system downstairs.

And the HMD stopped being recognised altogether... Red Light Black Screen/ Error 208 on Steam VR

However after so many swapping of cables, reseating of USBs, restarts and reinstalls of the setup software....

It suddenly started working,

And a day later the audio jack started working again too.

No idea what worked. But just trying everything in various orders seems to be one of the Vive's mini games.

EDIT: To clarify my setup:
i7 5820k @4.4ghz.
EVGA 980 ti SC Cooler Version.
HDMI from GPU to HDMI on Monitor.
Display port on GPU to mini display port on Vive Breakout box.
USB from Breakout box to USB 2.0.
Keyboard USB 2.0, Mouse USB 2.0, HOTAS USB 2.0

Vive set to Direct Mode (I think the thing that finally fixed it was unselecting direct mode. Restarting the HMD. Display came on and PC recognised Vive as dispay. Reselected Direct mode, Restarted HMD. Worked ever since.

[-=Danne=-]

I have the same problem. Everything is okay but the screen is black.

[litobeech]

I had this issue using a long cable, it turned out Valve/HTC explicitly recommends putting your PC at the edge of your playspace so you'll use short cables. I used 10m of HDMI, black screen but everything else worked ("Ready", games playing on mirror, green light, ect.). 5 meters everything worked but occasional black blinking. Today I fixed it using an active, single-amplifying/boosting/repeating cable with a "RedMere" chip in it, specifically the deltaco HDMI-2100 (About 40-50 bucks) and everything is fine now.

Extending the vive distance isn't supported, I tried using the 10m cable that didn't work on vive on some monitor, that was fine, I assume most TVs/Monitors have built-in repeaters, you'd think the link box would have one, after all it's got DC power from a wall plug, and repeaters are cheap, but hey.

[Polysorbate]

Issues like this have commonly been worked around by disabling Vive's camera in SteamVR settings. Motherboards often share I/O resources between multiple components, leading to insufficient bandwidth being available for interfaces which require a large amount of bandwidth at low latency, as Vive does.

If disabling the camera solves the issue for you, installing a PCI-Express USB expansion card is the best way of reliably overcoming the bandwidth limitation with the camera enabled. Here's one Valve recommends which I can verify has solved my USB issues: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00ME7454O

Originally posted by Ikaros:

I had this issue using a long cable, it turned out Valve/HTC explicitly recommends putting your PC at the edge of your playspace so you'll use short cables. I used 10m of HDMI, black screen but everything else worked ("Ready", games playing on mirror, green light, ect.). 5 meters everything worked but occasional black blinking. Today I fixed it using an active, single-amplifying/boosting/repeating cable with a "RedMere" chip in it, specifically the deltaco HDMI-2100 (About 40-50 bucks) and everything is fine now.

Extending the vive distance isn't supported, I tried using the 10m cable that didn't work on vive on some monitor, that was fine, I assume most TVs/Monitors have built-in repeaters, you'd think the link box would have one, after all it's got DC power from a wall plug, and repeaters are cheap, but hey.

Vive requires unusually high bandwidth compared to most devices a typical inexpensive HDMI cable might be connected to, such as a standard 1080p60 output.

1080p (1920x1080) is 2,073,600 pixels per frame, typically at 60 FPS, for a total of 124,416,000 pixels per second.

At its 2160x1200 native resolution, Vive requires 2,592,000 pixels per frame, which at at 90 FPS totals 233,280,000 pixels per second. Many inexpensive cables seem to be incapable of supplying the bandwidth their manufacturer suggests they should.

I'm not an electrician but it seems plausible to me that even a cable capable of 4K (3840x2160) at 60hz may suffer signal degradation at a higher cycle rate (90hz) despite Vive's lower resolution.

Cheap repeaters or signal boosters also introduce latency which wouldn't be a problem with a conventional display but which is unacceptable for VR.

Here's a community-compiled list of confirmed working/non-working extension cables:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/wiki/cables ... I would still treat it only as a guide. Retailers often switch suppliers without giving any notice, so "Batch A" may work fine but 6 months from now "Batch B" may be noncompliant.

[Engine]

This is what I've done to fix the Black screen:
If you don't have a powerful display port cable or adapter you will have a black screen
which it was the case for me.

Instead of connecting the HTC Vive to a display port socket,
I used an Display port male to HDMI female for my TV.
After that, I connected the HDMI cable provided with my headset directly to my Graphic card.
Wait for the drivers installation, and you should be able to see in 3D :)

I hope this help.

[Polysorbate]

I think they meant by "powerful" was an "active" cable. The type that converts from an HDMI signal to a DisplayPort one and vice versa. Passive cables that don't do conversion also exist but these rely on the video card being smart enough to tell the difference I think.

Or maybe they mean a powered repeater cable.

In either case, it's not a sure bet. Some cables that "should" be compatible aren't. Refer to the list I posted.

[Engine]

Originally posted by Polysorbate:

I think they meant by "powerful" was an "active" cable. The type that converts from an HDMI signal to a DisplayPort one and vice versa. Passive cables that don't do conversion also exist but these rely on the video card being smart enough to tell the difference I think.

Or maybe they mean a powered repeater cable.

In either case, it's not a sure bet. Some cables that "should" be compatible aren't. Refer to the list I posted.

I purchased this cable here:
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00YOQYQWY/ref=cfb_at_prodpg

I can confirm that this cable work with the Vive Headset.

[a50lbDong (Wa2)]

Yea i had a similar issue seems like disabling direct mode, restarting steam vr and then reselecting direct mode and restarting steam vr cleared it up for me. Seems like something going on with direct mode.