This is a broadly substance free post. But I assume most VR headset owners have at this point at least tried Half Life: Alyx.
It therefore follows that most of you are familiar with this dumb popup you get the first time you run it:
Fair enough, on my old PC I only had a Sandy Bridge i7 2600K and a GTX1080Ti. Maybe I was below the recommended requirement even though I played through the entire campaign just fine.
Well, I just built a new PC containing a Ryzen 9 9900X, a Radeon RX 7900 XTX with 24 gigs of VRAM, and 64 gigs of system RAM.
And I still get that dumb “low memory” popup.
This game came out four years ago, Valve. What the hell did you expect people to play it on? A Cray EX254?
That’s weird. I started Alyx today for the very first time on lower hardware than your current GPU and didn’t get that message. I’m using a mini PC with a 6600m GPU (8 GB) and Quest2 VR goggles on Airlink.
I would guess it’s bad programming where because vram didn’t return say 8, 12, or 16, it shows the error.
This message is mainly from the game thinking Windows’ paging file/swap aren’t large enough. I’ve seen it default to static sizes, to Windows controlled and small, and to (what I think is best) Windows controlled and its the size of your RAM.
When I last played, I was using w11 from a custom .iso install. It was static set to like 2gigs, and setting it to match my 16gigs of RAM made the warning go away.
Most people don’t know, but a lot of programs are designed to use an amount of Windows’ paging file, and/or a Linux swap partition or the newer zram.
Anyone know where I can get a Cray EX254 on the cheap?
Those messages are wrong in most games, especially as they age. Alan Wake 2 still tells me that my driver is too old and then runs just fine.
Although I did not get that message in Alyx on my 7900 XTX.
I don’t think it was bullshit. When Alyx came out, SteamVR still had substantial issues managing VRAM at times. As a VRChat player, it was very obvious.
This warning may have been partially related to the SteamVR overlay failing when VRAM is full, when it failed the overlay wouldn’t work. And then there were massive perf issues when returning to the app. All centered around managing VRAM.
To this day the overlay will fail to come up if VRAM is maxed out or over burdened. But it seems to recover better. So this issue has improved a lot since Alyx came out. At least in my experience.
Maybe I’m way off. But to sum things up, I don’t think it was bullshit. It was just very cautious and upfront about possible issues.
It is strange that you are still seeing the message on your new config tho. Might just be a bug. — Maybe it’s reading your integrated graphics VRAM in error? Are you using Link with a Quest? Maybe that config causes it to read things wrong?
I’m using a Reverb G2 connected directly (which admittedly is the only way to use that headset).
I dunno. I can hop into the SteamVR overlay during gameplay just fine, or even pop up the dumb WMR menu and pin virtual desktop windows all over my game environment without issue. I have no idea what the bee in its bonnet is about. Based on my limited it experience it seems to show that warning to everybody regardless of all other external factors. There are people online with even more powerful rigs than mine complaining about it.
I wasn’t really fishing for a solution. I just find it deeply silly, and kind of amusing.
Yeah, the error seems totally busted. Or it was a broad disclaimer posing as an error.
Also, I’m sure the overlay works fine for you. But to test what I was explaining properly, you need to overload your vram, and then open it.
Can you explain what you mean by connected directly?
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Not… Wireless?
Ahhh gotcha… didn’t put two n two together with the Quest… duh
I see this popup all the time since getting my 3080 and Reverb G2. I don’t recall it ever causing issues though.
I also don’t recall seeing it on my 1080 and vive pro (wireless) which is what I used to play the game the first time.
I’ve played through all of Alyx and I don’t remember seeing this popup. My GPU has 24GB of VRAM.
By chance, do you have the 64gb RAM on DDR5, and is it 4 × 16 or 2 × 32?
Also, do you have XMPP or similar turned on?
Those can sometimes cause issues with RAM detection in games.
I don’t remember seeing that on Linux. Probably a Windows issue 🫠
