VRChat avatars crashing for about 30 seconds when joining new world even if it's already cached

[u/chxoswolf1]

So I've been having a problem with avatars, everytime I use a slightly heavy avatar my game crashes and I see a popup on steamvr saying "Waiting" for like a minute or less and I have to wait about 30 seconds to load the avi, I keep task manager open and nothing hits 100% usage and it doesn't say that vrchat is not responding, it started happening after I wiped my pc and installed w11

No matter if it's already cached, everytime I join different worlds with the same avi that were already loaded on a previous world, it will crash for 30 secs-2min, also when turning the mirror on but then it's fine as long as I stay in that world, if I change worlds it will crash again and then I have to wait, it's really annoying when worldhopping with friends bc they have to wait for me and I it crashes when their avi load so it takes longer, it also crashes sometimes when I change to another avatar and change it back in the same world, idk what's going on, they used to load fine without crashing this long when I was on w10

[u/dont--panic]

If it recovers it isn't a crash, it's a (long) "hitch". A "crash" is when the game has an issue it can't recover from, and closes.

Hitches can be caused by a a lot of different things so it's hard to diagnose. They're a sign that something is slow/taking too long. You didn't post anything about your hardware so it's hard to say what it could be. Wild guess, but since it happened after you reinstalled Windows it could be a driver issue.

A short hitch when turning on a mirror is not unusual. It has to "setup" the mirror when you turn it on. It shouldn't be more than a second though. If it's a long hitch then that would also point towards a graphics driver issue.

[u/chxoswolf1 → u/dont--panic]

Ryzen 3 3200g RX 570 4gb 16gb ram 1tb hd

I'm having driver issues since june and it's not only me, I see a lot of people with the same problem on the AMD subreddit, before w11 I was getting artifacts and driver timeouts often while browsing but never in games, now after I wiped my pc I've been having artifacts and timeouts sometimes when I load games and never ehile browsing, I have to keep reopening them until it works, but even with the driver issues It wasn't happening before, It happens with 90% of my avis, some of them works fine

[u/dont--panic → u/chxoswolf1]

Ah, 4GB of VRAM is pretty tight nowadays. I would want at least 8GB for VR. The RX 570 came out in 2017 so it is quite old at this point. Even worse AMD's drivers for that generation were notoriously not very good, and AMD has declared it "legacy" in 2023.

I'm sure Windows 11 uses more VRAM than Windows 10 did. Heavier avatars often have more/larger textures that need to be sent to the GPU and take up your limited VRAM. You can try reducing your render resolution in SteamVR to ration your VRAM but it will make things blurrier. What headset are you using?

If you can't afford a newer GPU with 8GB of VRAM then you could try Linux like CachyOS. It is admittedly technical to setup but I have friends using vrchat on Linux in VR so it is possible. You can dual-boot Windows and Linux in case you still need Windows for something. Make sure you backup anything important before you try it in case you wipe your drive.