I've bought the Valve Index VR headset and wanted to play on Linux. I had done a lot of tinkering with my Linux Machine up to this point so quite a few things on the headset initially had issues working alright.
I have listed all of the problems I encountered on ArchLinux with Valve Index and Steam VR in this post and how I managed to solve nearly all of them.
When I first plugged in my headset, turned on the controllers and started
SteamVR it had been doing a lot of things: it prompted me to confirm that super user /
administrator is needed to complete the installation, it opened a huge window
with the VR view in it and complained that direct mode wasn't enabled. In the VR
setup log it also complained about not being able to run some SETCAP command.
SteamVR tried to start the room setup, however the window only showed a title bar
and immediately crashed without drawing anything. I have also tried a xrandr call to
turn on the headset monitor and manually move the big VR display to it and
fullscreen it with i3, but this was a bad solution and later on I
managed to instead fix and use direct mode.
When I eventually got the VR setup working and set up my room, I put on my headset. I noticed when I move my head around that it was kind of high latency, so I would notice there was like a few frames of delay there. I tried to bump up the display frequency of the display, but I think my GPU wasn't powerful enough for it. On 120 Hz I had a weird glitched horizontal line in the middle of my screen and the bottom half was basically a frame behind. On 144 Hz the display kept turning off and on just showing gray, basically flickering a lot. For now I don't have a solution to this yet and keep playing in 90 Hz, which works fine if you change the settings as described below. UPDATE: this was most likely because my GPU wasn't powerful enough. I got a new GPU now (Radeon 5700 XT) and now both 120 Hz and 144 Hz run absolutely fine. Also if you experience issues on an AMD (CPU & GPU) system with your system freezing and crashing under high GPU load, check out the following links: 1 2 3 4
I changed the BIOS settings for C-State and IOMMU and some others mentioned in
the links and added pcie_aspm=off to my GRUB cmdline. Not sure what exactly
fixed the GPU freezes but at least they are gone now.
The next issue I had was that audio wasn't playing through the speakers of the Valve Index on my Linux machine. Additionally the microphone was being detected by PulseAudio but it was constantly not generating any input. I managed to fix both of these issues however as described below.
Problems & Fixes:
Problem: VR room setup doesn't launch on Linux
Solution: I had on my first try a very peculiar bug where the VR room setup window from Steam VR would not load and just crash. I tried a lot to get this working, but in the end the solution was to reinstall SteamVR. I did this after SteamVR had successfully installed new firmware on my Headset and Controllers, so this might be a neccessary step to do before too.
Problem: Sudo / Administrator prompt doesn't open for VR Setup on i3
Solution: As I was running i3 but didn't have the GUI password prompts for
sudo requests configured yet, no GUI window to set this up popped up and SteamVR
probably did nothing. The solution was to
install polkit and also install
some authentication agent, in my case I installed polkit-gnome using
trizen -S polkit-gnome. Important here is that this is not a SystemD service
but rather an application you will have to launch manually in order to make GUI
password prompts pop up. Start the path as described on the ArchLinux wiki
manually and keep it running in the background if you want
to get the password prompt for this single session. If you run i3 and want to
have the password prompt always work, just launch the authentication agent from your i3 launch
script.
You may need to reinstall SteamVR in order to make it show the admin prompt again. After doing this direct mode should be enabled and the huge VR output window should no longer be on your desktop but rather in the VR display, hooray!
Problem: High latency in VR when moving head around
Solution: There was a setting in Video (with Show Advanced Settings) called "Advanced Supersample Filtering" enabled on my headset by default. Turning this off and (manually) restarting SteamVR had greatly reduced the latency when moving my head around, making it feasable to use for a long period of time.
I'm also running i3 with picom (previously compton), however this shouldn't make a difference if the headset runs in Direct Mode as solved in the solution above. If you want to make extra sure that it runs in direct mode, open the Developer -> Developer Settings (from the SteamVR dropdown menu, not from inside the SteamVR settings) and click on the "Enable Direct Display Mode" button.
Problem: Flickering VR display, broken VR display view, VR display artifacts
Solution: Try turning off SteamVR and plugging out and in the whole Valve Index headset. If you run on high refresh rates (>90Hz) you might want to turn them down. Also try to reduce the graphics settings inside the games you are playing.
Problem: Valve Index Audio doesn't work on Linux
Solution: as described on the SteamVR for linux page on Valve's GitHub, first make sure you've got the latest Mesa version, Linux kernel and Xorg server version. After this it should theoretically start working.
I also had another problem which caused it to not work: I had amdgpu.dc=0 in
my Grub GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT value. I did this a while ago and forgot
that I did that, however after removing the setting, calling
grub-mkconfig and rebooting the PC the problem was gone and (both my monitor
and) the Valve Index could play sound again. You can also add amdgpu.dc=1,
however this has long been the default in the kernel now, so you shouldn't need
to do this as long as you remove the 0 value.
Problem: Valve Index Microphone doesn't work on Linux
Solution: Make sure your system is up-to-date as described in the Valve
README linked above. I had modified my /etc/pulse/daemon.conf before to make
wine run better, however this has introduced this issue to me. To fix it add
or change
default-sample-rate = 48000
in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and run
pulseaudio -k to kill the current pulseaudio session.
I found the issue here and the solution was burried in the comments here.
A collaborator, probably Valve employee, said on 4 Sep 2019:
We are working with the graphics driver vendors to address the issue.
Note that the Index earphones are what require the 48KHz sample rate, which is currently being set to 44.1KHz. The invalid sample rate is causing audio artifacts on the Index Hummingbird headset and causing the microphone controller to constantly reset.
So this issue might be fixed soon too.
I'm using the standard repositories, here are my software versions: