Summary
Voice chat reliably fails during play. My own outgoing voice degrades/stops first, followed within about a minute by everyone else’s incoming voice disappearing simultaneously. This is not a network, freeze, or hardware issue — extensive local monitoring during multiple live occurrences shows the client, OS, and network are all functioning normally while the symptom is happening.
Environment
- VRChat version: w_2026.2.3p1-f71d38272d (Steam, branch: default)
- Platform: Desktop mode, Windows
- Audio interface: Yamaha AG03MK2 (USB)
- Voice/comm software also running: Discord (audio subsystem set to Standard, not Experimental)
- Launch options: -gc.incremental --enable-sdk-log-levels --enable-debug-gui
Reproduction rate
100% — happens in every single play session, regardless of world, avatar, or number of players present.
Symptom pattern
- My own outgoing voice begins to stutter/cut out first.
- Within roughly 1 minute, everyone else’s voice disappears too — this happens to all players simultaneously, not gradually one-by-one.
- Photon (UDP) connection to the game server remains alive throughout (confirmed via netstat, port stays connected).
- Voice sometimes recovers on its own without any action (rejoining is NOT required to recover), but after recovering it frequently cuts out again — a repeating cycle of mute → recover → mute → recover, sometimes several times per session.
- This is a distinct issue from a separate (already mitigated) freeze/crash caused by excessive particle systems triggering a Unity GC stall (-gc.incremental launch option resolved that separate issue). The voice cutout described here happens with no particle spam, no freeze, and no elevated RAM.
Diagnostics already collected (during 3+ live occurrences, timestamped)
While voice was cut out, I logged the following every 5–10 seconds via external scripts and Windows tools:
- Process responsiveness: Process.Responding = True throughout (no hang/freeze on the main thread)
- RAM usage: stable, no leak or spike correlated with the voice loss
- Frame time: normal (8–54ms range, no stalls)
- Network throughput: normal bursty send/receive pattern consistent with typical VRChat traffic; no stalls or drops
- External ping: stable, 8–13ms, no spikes
- Photon UDP socket: remains connected (netstat confirms the session to the Photon relay IP stays established)
- VRChat’s own output log: no errors, warnings, or disconnect/reconnect events logged at the exact time of the voice loss
- Windows Event Viewer (System/Application logs, PnP and Audio providers): no entries at all during the incident window
- VRChat in-game debug menu → Players tab (Photon network stats): per-player interval quality (Intrvl Q) values showed no meaningful difference between symptom and non-symptom periods — ruled out as a discriminator
- USB audio device: no selective-suspend/power-management option exposed for the interface (expected for USB Audio Class devices)
Steps already tried (none resolved this specific issue)
- NIC power-saving settings disabled, checksum offload/LSO/interrupt moderation reset to defaults
- CPU affinity restriction removed from launch options
- BIOS PCIe link speed locked to Gen3 (unrelated NIC dropout mitigation)
- Discord audio subsystem forced to “Standard” and locked (read-only settings file)
- Windows “communications ducking” (Sound settings → Communications tab) set to “Do Nothing”
- Windows “Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device” checked/tested
- Confirmed not tied to: specific world, specific avatar, player count, or particle count
Additional important detail
This never happens in any other application — not in other games with voice chat, and not in dedicated voice call apps (e.g. Discord) used simultaneously on the same PC with the same audio hardware. The audio hardware and OS-level voice pipeline are demonstrably reliable outside of VRChat. This strongly points to something specific to VRChat’s client-side audio/voice handling (Unity audio mixer state, or the Photon Voice client pipeline) rather than my hardware, drivers, or network.
Request
Given the 100% reproduction rate and the fact that all external diagnostics (OS, network, hardware) are clean during the incident, this looks like a client-side bug in VRChat’s voice pipeline. I’m happy to provide the full output log, a Dump Stats to JSON from the Players debug panel, or run additional diagnostics if that would help investigate.