Nvidia confirms ‘open issue’ with Varjo Aero VR headsets and RTX 50-series graphics cards after affected users ask for help

Last week we reported that Varjo Aero VR headsets seem to not be working with RTX 5090s, but at the time there was no official response from Nvidia other than asking to fill out a driver feedback form and give more info. In the latest 572.83 driver announcement, however, Nvidia has acknowledged the problem as an ‘open issue’.

Under the ‘open issues’ section, the Nvidia driver forum announcement post says: “Varjo Aero VR headset may fail to establish connection.” (The reason I’m referring to the forum post rather than the Release Notes [PDF] is because this particular issue, amongst others, is mysteriously absent from the official document.)

That’s potentially good news for Varjo Aero VR headset owners with an RTX 50-series graphics card, then—though of course we’ll only be sure once the issue is moved to the ‘fixed’ column hopefully in one of the upcoming driver releases. Though Nvidia does point out with its driver issues section that these aren’t always its fault.

The problem is that the headset just doesn’t seem to work with some users’ RTX 5090 cards at all, at least not without hacky workarounds. Users have been trying all sorts, including plugging the headset into a Thunderbolt expansion card, essentially cutting the monitor out entirely.

The RTX 50-series hasn’t exactly been issue-free thus far, either. Black screen issues have been the main bugbear, and previous driver releases have claimed to fix these black screen problems.

It’s noteworthy, however, that the announcement for this new driver release states “GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs crashes with black screen” has been fixed… again… which means more fixes for more black screen bugs.

It does appear to be Nvidia that’s responsible for fixing this particular Varjo issue, though that’s not yet confirmed. A user in the original forum thread regarding the issue said: “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.”

Well, at least Nvidia seems to be recognising this now and is considering it an open issue for its own drivers. Fingers crossed there’s a fix in the pipeline.