There’s a black screen of death that’s been hanging over Oculus Rift users for the last month or so, causing the VR headset to black out after the PC wakes from sleep. Oculus have warned users against updating to the latest GeForce drivers, but the Fall Creators Update for Windows 10 seems as culpable.
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It’s pretty bad timing considering the Rift has now overtaken the HTC Vive on the Steam Hardware page. On the front page of the Oculus Support Center there’s a big red splash which reads:
“If you are using an Nvidia GPU and currently experiencing display or performance issues with your Oculus Rift, please make sure you’re using driver version 388.59. Later versions may cause compatibility issues with Oculus software.”
There was a hotfix Nvidia driver release yesterday which addressed some issues Titan V users were having (yeah, poor things… all the sympathy), but it hasn’t mentioned anything to do with Rift headset issues. If you want to roll back your drivers, you can grab the 388.59 drivers here.
But despite Oculus’ front page warning about Nvidia drivers it looks like there’s a good chance at least some of the problems lie at Microsoft’s door.
After the Fall Creators Update it seems some USB and HDMI connections are affected when they awake from sleep, and by turning off fast startup some users are reporting that fixes there problems. It’s also been suggested that dipping into your BIOS and turning off the Fast Boot option could help, as could temporarily disabling the Guardian system. Though you might end up walking into walls…
If you’ve been having some Rift black screen issues then thepossible fix has been outlined on the Oculus forums here.