Stability, Display, and Performance Issues Caused by the Nahimic Service (Critical)

Problem

Many Windows PCs are distributed with the Nahimic service. This service is a suite of audio drivers aimed at enhancing your audio experience. When the service is running, it interacts with video and audio drivers and significantly disrupts MAK ONE applications. The Nahimic service is frequently installed by computer manufacturers including DELL and is likely found on many gaming PCs.

Problems caused by the service include:

• A severe impact on performance and frame rates.
• Extremely long waits to open a MAK ONE Application GUI.
• MAK ONE applications may occasionally not open at all - the GUI will not fully initialize but the application will continue to run in the background.
• The cursor may become unresponsive.
• General instability causes MAK ONE GUI applications to crash.

Affected MAK Applications

All versions of MAK ONE applications including VR-Vantage, VR-Engage, and VR-Forces are affected. Newer versions of MAK ONE applications will test and warn if the Nahimic service is running in the console.

Severity

Critical - The problems caused by Nahimic affect all MAK ONE applications across all versions and cause significant instability and performance problems.

Platforms

This problem only occurs when using Microsoft Windows. It exists in at least Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Solution

MAK is unable to "fix" this in our applications as problems occur deep in NVIDIA drivers and the Qt toolkit. To resolve the problem, end users must disable, remove, or suspend the Nahimic service. Problems associated with Nahimic are widely discussed online, as well as approaches to disabling and removing the service. Here is a link that describes removing the service from the Microsoft community forum:

Uninstalling Nahimic Companion that Windows Update installed - Microsoft Community