Question Anyone else having issues with VAM and Windows 11?

[Murasaki]

Heyo! Ever since I installed Windows 11 I've been having issues with VAM. When something is loading like a menu or a person the game usually hangs a little bit, which is normal, but sometimes it seems to cause SteamVR to crash.
The game is still running and it all works fine apart from being more laggy but the headset's screen goes black until I restart it.

All SteamVR tells me is that the headset has crashed and gives me the -203 error code which I can't find online. I haven't tried going back to Windows 10 because I can't right now but later on I might give it a shot.
The things I have tried are: reinstalling Windows 11, starting up base VAM, checking all the connections, disabling overclocks and running everything on baseline but nothing helped.
Every other game runs just fine but when VAM loads something it can randomly crash.

Has anyone been experiencing issues on Windows 11 and VAM?

Here are my specs:

Spoiler

CPU: R5 5600x

GPU: GTX 1070

RAM: DDR4 32GB 3200MHz

Headset: Valve Index

SteamVR version: 1.21.8 (1644369508)

Windows 11 version: 22000.493

Driver version: 511.65

 

[suggins]

I was having some issue in Win 11 too... VAM would crash after about 5 minutes, leading to a BSOD. Have you tried updating your motherboard BIOS? Ever since I did that it's been working fine for me.

 

[Murasaki]

I was having some issue in Win 11 too... VAM would crash after about 5 minutes, leading to a BSOD. Have you tried updating your motherboard BIOS? Ever since I did that it's been working fine for me.

Unfortunately mine seems to break at random. Sometimes it can go for 3-4 hours and then the next time break after 10 minutes.
I'm running the latest BIOS so I hope that's not the issue because I doubt MSI is gonna push more of them.

 

[TToby]

I can vividly remember the early days of SteamVR. With every update I had the fear my headset would stay black, would not be recognized anymore or I had weird crashes.
It really takes a long time (more than a year iirc) till everything works absolute flawlessly.
This can‘t be compared to nowerdays and will not help you at all, but VR is still a niche product and is neglected by the great players. Display Port, USB, Bluetooth, Display Drivers, Sound Drivers, SteamVR, … there is so much that can have small issues with a new OS, but may lead to severe issues with VR in combination. I was very exited to install Windows 11 myselfe, but didn‘t dare because exactly of this.

 

[Murasaki]

I can vividly remember the early days of SteamVR. With every update I had the fear my headset would stay black, would not be recognized anymore or I had weird crashes.
It really takes a long time (more than a year iirc) till everything works absolute flawlessly.
This can‘t be compared to nowerdays and will not help you at all, but VR is still a niche product and is neglected by the great players. Display Port, USB, Bluetooth, Display Drivers, Sound Drivers, SteamVR, … there is so much that can have small issues with a new OS, but may lead to severe issues with VR in combination. I was very exited to install Windows 11 myselfe, but didn‘t dare because exactly of this.

To be fair everything else seems to work perfectly fine it's just VAM acting up. It seems like disabling the "Fade to grid on app hang" setting might have helped though but will have to keep playing more to see. So far played about 9 hours and it's been fine so, fingers crossed!

If you ever do pull the trigger on Win11, I'd strongly recommend getting things like EarTrumpet to restore the audio sliders and something like StartAllBack to make the taskbar much better.

 

[RandomVAMUser]

I'd strongly recommend getting things like EarTrumpet to restore the audio sliders and something like StartAllBack to make the taskbar much better.

Such a incorrect way of using windows 11!

the more buried features are (with unnecessary clicks) = more productivity (duh)

No surprise if win11 23H1 is gonna be titled "oopsie", with start rework as main "feature" (aka windows 8.1 deja vu). ?

 

[TToby]

Recently I have read that a surprisingly big amount of shops and companies in Germany are still using Windows XP.
But seriously… there are (were?) so many tests showing Windows11 isn‘t faster than Windows10 with games, so why taking risks with my VR gamin PC. At the other hand, everything is working fine on my productivity PC and Windows10 will still be supported for a long time, so why stopping being productive and re-install everything with a new OS ?
Saying this, the PC freak part of me is very curious about a brand new Windows…
Atm, the rational parts are still keeping the upper hand.

 

[Murasaki]

Recently I have read that a surprisingly big amount of shops and companies in Germany are still using Windows XP.
But seriously… there are (were?) so many tests showing Windows11 isn‘t faster than Windows10 with games, so why taking risks with my VR gamin PC. At the other hand, everything is working fine on my productivity PC and Windows10 will still be supported for a long time, so why stopping being productive and re-install everything with a new OS ?
Saying this, the PC freak part of me is very curious about a brand new Windows…
Atm, the rational parts are still keeping the upper hand.

A lot of places are still using Windows 98 and such because that's what the machines were programmed on and can't be bothered to update or there would be compatibility issues if they did.

Honestly, the main reason why I switched so early is because I liked the new look and knew that most the issues would be fixed by the community in like a month and luckily they were.
Other than these issues with VAM, I haven't had anything else except some stuttering but that was because of Nvidia drivers installing weird so I had to DDU them.
Windows 10 has been fine but I was never a fan of it but it was alright.

 

[YourGirlSideDude]

Ever since installing win11 I have not been able to launch vam except if I reinstall it fresh with the updater. As soon as I put back all the addon packages, custom and save folder back it just wont launch wheter I use desktop or vr. Now I have to figure out what I have to remove to make it work, 250gb of trial and error... yay...

 

[keycode]

I installed windows 11 some ... lot of time ago or better ... 2 intel processors upgrade ago ... but even if I was eventually very curious to test issues, no way! my system still works VERY fast and fine. No need to waste days reinstalling my personal files (or formatting clean the main partition), I was not loosing any login priviledges or data compatibility with some really old, stone age gov. administration programs. No vam related issues too. Absolutely no issues. And now I like it even more than windows 10.

 

[YourGirlSideDude]

I installed windows 11 some ... lot of time ago or better ... 2 intel processors upgrade ago ... but even if I was eventually very curious to test issues, no way! my system still works VERY fast and fine. No need to waste days reinstalling my personal files (or formatting clean the main partition), I was not loosing any login priviledges or data compatibility with some really old, stone age gov. administration programs. No vam related issues too. Absolutely no issues. And now I like it even more than windows 10.

Well good for you I guess

 

[keycode]

Recently I have read that a surprisingly big amount of shops and companies in Germany are still using Windows XP.
But seriously… there are (were?) so many tests showing Windows11 isn‘t faster than Windows10 with games, so why taking risks with my VR gamin PC. At the other hand, everything is working fine on my productivity PC and Windows10 will still be supported for a long time, so why stopping being productive and re-install everything with a new OS ?
Saying this, the PC freak part of me is very curious about a brand new Windows…
Atm, the rational parts are still keeping the upper hand.

what I like about windows 11: with the good old windows 10 I remember having very sporadical issues with some really old programs compatibility and running that "try it with compatibility mode" option in the exe property, regularly without success.
I was reading also a lot of other negative opinions about it (win 11) ... that's why I was saving a full sys backup before testing it, I was also skeptic about my decision not to format a new fresh primary partition for the microsoft baby system.

Well... my first windows 11 "dirty" install was needing a surprisingly short amount of minutes and what it was working with windows 10 it works (even better) perfect with the 11. Of course I can't say that I like some parossistic "security" paranoia, neither everything related to some obvious dirty commercial tricks to convince us in using a lot of tracked and spying applications, included the so called pain in the ass "windows hello" login protocol. But is it not the same situation in windows 10??

ps: I have Firefox and Opera (I love Opera for its VPN free!) but I appreciate a lot Microsoft Edge too, specially when I need to use (damned fucking administration or financial) online services, my default browser.

 

[decameron]

I'm sorry to hear that you've been having issues with the game. I have had my fair share of compatibility issues with old programs on Windows 10. I recently bought a cheap Windows key online and decided to upgrade to Windows 11, despite the negative opinions I've read about it. Surprisingly, the installation process was quick, and everything that worked on Windows 10 works even better on Windows 11. Regarding your issues with VAM, it could be a compatibility problem with Windows 11. Have you tried running the game in compatibility mode? It might also be worth checking if there are any updates for VAM that could address the issue. Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience, and I hope you can find a solution to your problem. By the way, I also use Opera for its VPN feature, but I've been trying out Microsoft Edge lately, and it's been working great for me.