Vive Recognized as Monitor

[ConflictEnsues]

Good morning everyone! I'm having a lot of issues and Vive support hasn't really been able to help. There is a person who has managed to fix them on the same system as mine but I fear there may be details lacking in his explanation since I haven't been able to. I replied to his post (linked) with details about what I've tried so far.

https://community.viveport.com/t5/Technical-Support/Can-you-run-the-vive-from-a-usc-c-to-hdmi-adapter-using-alt-mode/m-p/23064#M8692

If anyone is able to help, I'd be very appreciative; I'll even Venmo the first person a small recompense if they manage to solve it!

Thank you.

[flibbertigibbety]

I believe direct mode is what you need. From my understand, if you turn off direct mode (enabling extended mode), the vive will be seen as another monitor. The option should be in the steam vr settings under developer, I think.

[The Maddog]

I can help....a little.

I assume your system is the Yoga 720? Off the bat that is problematic as it's not a VR ready laptop and for good reasons. Vive support wont be able to help you either. Again..not supported means exactly that. I'd also recommend you discard a lot of what "houseinahouse" says. The Vive wont run on "just about anything" no matter what he says. It "possibly" will run with certain work arounds but there's a whole lot of incompatible hardware out there and your laptop is one of them. Getting it work is going to be a swing and a miss depending on the spesific chipset your motherboard is using. He got lucky and we dont acctually know how he's using it. He's using it to just "check code" rather than for any sort of acctual proper VR use.

Problem is the current Vive just wont work properly through the current USB-C. However, the next iteration of VR headsets and GPUs will have a spesific USB-C variant standard which is being called "Virtuallink".

Even if you get it working, you're going to have a terrible time with it. A 1050 just isnt capable of maintaining the 90 fps the Vive needs to work correctly. You're very likely to induce VR sickness and make yourself ill.

But that does not help you and there is little to nothing I can offer in terms of solutions with your current hardware.

Assuming you have tried to witch direct mode on and off in the SteamVr settings to no avail, their is only one possible guarenteed solution I know of and that is an EGPU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTHvPmrt9CU

Unfortunetely, EGPU's take a big perfomance hit against pci-e / built in use of the cards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeGWwziCrpw

As such this means you need a really powerful card in there for VR use. You'd really need to be looking at a GTX 1080 + the EGPU for decent VR results. When used in a eGPU enclosure and due to certain USB-C limitations, a 1060 wont do it and a 1070 may struggle with certain VR titles.

So..the only viable solutions I know of are:

Purchase a GTX 1080 + eGPU enclosure (Probably around £1000 for the pair).

Purchase a VR ready laptop (around £780 starting with the 1060)

Purchase or build a VR desktop machine (Starting around the £500 mark and going up depending what you want and / or need).


None of them are cheap solutions I'm afraid but fact of the matter is your current laptop is wholely unsuitable for VR. Sorry it's not better news but it is what it is.

[ConflictEnsues]

Perhaps you are right and it cannot be resolved. In that case, I'll just send it back in a week. Still, so long as I can get it to hobble along and see for myself the performance gap, I will be satisfied.

Thank you very much for your reply; it has prepared me to accept the worst, I suppose.