Abstract⎯ The influence of retardation between orthogonal components of circularly polarized light on diffraction pattern generated by the vortex phase plate with a birefringence medium is considered. It is shown that if the ideal retardation π is broken, the pattern diffracted from the phase plate is described by superposition of two components: the vortex beam with the deep hole and the incident beam which preserves its initial characteristics. The computation results characterizing the influence of retardation on the Gaussian and Airy beams transformation in the vortex phase plate are presented. These results point out that vortex beam characteristics are very sensitive to retardation shift from its ideal value. We analyze and present the characteristics of the vortex phase plate that are required for the true vortex pattern generation.