VR-Vantage Is Not Stable (The Ultimate Checklist)

VR-Vantage is our 3D rendering engine and is used for the VR-Forces GUI and VR-Engage. You may have been brought to this page because of problems with either VR-Forces GUI or VR-Engage. Please note what we describe here works for both of those as well as VR-Vanatge.

You are here because you are experiencing instability with VR-Vantage. We are sorry to hear this. Please read on.

This page contains a checklist you should go through to verify you aren’t experiencing one of many possible known issues. This list is sorted such that the most likely issues are towards the top:

1. Do you have the latest version? Specifically, do you have the latest maintenance release? We only share patch releases through support, but you can find the latest official release here: Support: Product Specifications & Dependencies.

2. Verify that your Video Driver is up to date. There are many versions of NVIDIA drivers that cause crashes. For example, here: Various Releases of NVIDIA Drivers Cause Crashes - Product Support Knowledge Base

3. Verify that you are not running Nahimic. Nahimic is a service that is often installed on your computer by various hardware vendors, including Dell. Nahimic causes frequent crashes in MAK products. Honestly, Nahimic causes frequent crashes in many games as well. For more, see: Crashes, Display, and Performance Issues Caused by the Nahimic Service (Critical) - Product Support Knowledge Base

4. Verify that you are not running out of VRAM. To see how much VRAM you are using look inside the VR-Vantage application. Using the task manager to assess total VRAM consumption does not provide reliable results. Press F2 twice. Look here:

   Open

   

   There can be many reasons you are running out of VRAM:

   1. Your graphics card simply doesn’t have enough. You will need 16 GB of VRAM per VRV-based application to be comfortable. That means, with many terrains, lower-end cards like RTX 4060 may not be enough. Support: Hardware Recommendations

   2. Often times, many applications are using VRAM, not only MAK products.

   3. Sometimes, due to poor terrain or model configuration, even this can be readily consumed. You can dig into this a bit by opening the “Video Memory breakup” header in the picture above. This often tells just what is using all your VRAM.

   4. Sometimes, if you are zooming in aggressively (50x), this can make problems more obvious. Let us know if this is causing it. When you zoom in, depending on your settings you may just be loading a lot more terrain.

5. Check your hardware specifically:

   1. Are you running out of system RAM? Check the task manager on Windows for this.

   2. Are you running out of disk space? VR-Vantage can generate a cache directory.

6. Remove your VR-Vantage cache. It is typically found where you have installed VR-Vantage in the directory <VRV-InstallDir>/appData/cache. It is completely safe to delete the “cache” directory. Sometimes this becomes corrupted and leads to problems. This problem is extremely rare and is generally unlikely. It's good practice to try it just the same.

7. Change your system language to US English. While we support all languages, we have occasionally run into problems where the keyboard language made a difference. We clearly test with US English. Again, this is a very unlikely problem, but we have run into bugs in the past associated with this. Typically it takes a lot of work to try it because our support team doesn’t always use your language mappings.

8. We have seen some stability problems using a bad INTEL i9 13th generation CPUs. These chips will occasionally go bad due to problems with unregulated voltage on the chip. This is a rare problem, but we have seen it happen a few times. Various BIOS versions were increasing the voltage on the chip, causing some chip functionality to break. While the problem with this chip is quite common, it can manifest itself in strange ways. We have seen it where certain repeatable actions in VR-Vantage will cause the BSOD (blue screen of death). For us, the experience was highly repeatable but only on a specific machine and was resolved by replacing the chip.

9. We obviously suggest you remove any plug-ins you may have written to see if you can repeat the problem without the plug-in. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for customer-developed plug-ins to produce VRV-based crashes.

10. Make sure you have the PDBs installed. MAK distributes a PDB installer with every product. If you have this installed, any crash log you get will be more useful to us.

11. Please keep all crashlogs. In the latest versions of VR-Vantage, log files are kept in the C:\MAK\logs directory. Look for any file ending with a .callstack extension. This will be a text file you can inspect and send to us. If there is no .callstack file, please let us know. This is sometimes, but not always an indicator that it is a video driver problem. Please contact us in the MAK Support Center - Jira Service Management or by emailing support@mak.com. Please include the log.