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After buying a fancy new $2,000 RTX 5090 card, some VR users are discovering their Varjo Aero headsets are not working with their rig. The answer, for now, seems to be plugging the headset in via a Thunderbolt cable, setting the Varjo Base (Varjo’s software) to ‘Very Low’, or waiting for drivers—but none of these options are ideal.
As originally posted in the Nvidia forums under a thread titled “Please make Varjo VR Headsets work with RTX 5090!”, one user reports that after almost two months of trying, they could not get their Varjo Aero working on their RTX 5090. In response, Nvidia staff asked them to fill out a driver feedback form and capture a crash dmp file.
In our Varjo Aero review, we liked the VR headset’s display, found it all very comfortable to wear, and praised its price point, even though the required base station, lack of included controllers, and heavy feel weighed it down somewhat. At the time, there was no support for AMD GPUs, and now you can add reports of no support for RTX 5090s to the pile.
We don’t have the equipment to hand, so can’t verify this problem first hand. However, digging a bit deeper shows multiple reports of the same issue over at the Varjo Discord server.
A handful of solutions have come in so far, with perhaps the most creative being one user plugging their headset into a Thunderbolt 4 expansion card without using the included Varjo Link Box. This seems to effectively take the output from the port and redirect it to the VR headset, which means users are losing access to their monitor whilst playing VR.
Another user claims that setting their Varjo Base to ‘Very Low’ has fixed the problem, though others have had less success with this approach. It seems like tinkering heavily is the only way users have managed to get any sort of success from setting up their Varjo VR headset with their shiny new RTX 5090.
In the original Nvidia forum thread, user Sepian78 claims: “Varjo Support informed me that they are awaiting a driver to release to resolve these issues, but at this time this is outside of their control and can only be fixed by Nvidia.”
We have reached out to Nvidia for comment on this story and when we might expect a potential solution.
This story is reminiscent of the fact that many new RTX 50-series owners were met with black screen issues following their launch. Before the VBIOS and driver fixes for the cards were released, our Dave found you could often bypass it by setting your monitor to 60 Hz, though this was not a satisfactory long-term workaround for a high-end gaming GPU, and didn’t work for every app. Dave found these black screen issues while using HDMI, so RTX 50-series display bugs aren’t solely the purview of Display Port, right now.
The Varjo Aero, which seems to be the only reported VR headset I could find with this issue, was discontinued in early 2024. Other VR headsets do not seem affected by this peculiar problem.
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Kurt Indovina
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