Abstract A study of the far-field complex amplitude obtained from initially ordered arrays of N × M point-vortices with equal unitary topological charge embedded in carrier beams with different geometry is presented. This can be understood as the final stationary configuration after the dynamical evolution of the vortices upon propagation, and our aim is to investigate the impact of a geometric anisotropy on the diffraction process by using an elliptic Gaussian beam as a carrier and a rectangular vortex lattice. For comparison, illumination by a circular Gaussian beam and a plane wave diffracted by a rectangular aperture are also analyzed. We show that vortices tend to cluster in some regions under high eccentricity of the carrier and there can be an entire redistribution of the vortices depending on the size of the initial array with respect to the size of the carrier, which inherits some geometric characteristics of the latter.