Fix for Anki Not Launching or Hanging on “Starting Anki…” (Windows, AMD GPU)

Anki Help
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If Anki fails to launch and freezes at “Starting Anki…” or silently crashes, the cause is often a broken or outdated graphics driver—particularly with AMD Radeon GPUs. Anki’s GUI uses OpenGL via Qt, which can silently fail if hardware rendering is unsupported or broken. This worked for me:

  • Update your graphics driver:

  • Restart your computer.

  • If you need an immediate workaround before updating:

  • Open PowerShell or Command Prompt.

  • Navigate to Anki’s install folder:

cd "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\Anki"
  • Temporarily launch Anki using software rendering:
$env:QT_OPENGL="software"; Start-Process .\anki.exe
  • To make the workaround permanent (if needed):
  • Open System Properties → Environment Variables.
  • Under User variables, click New.
  • Set:
    • Variable name: QT_OPENGL
    • Variable value: software
  • Click OK and restart your system.
  • Once the driver is updated and Anki launches normally:
  • Go back to Environment Variables and delete QT_OPENGL to re-enable GPU acceleration.

I arrived at this solution with a lot of back and forth with ChatGPT, but can confirm that it worked for me on a Windows 11 PC with the 25.02.5 (29192d15)⁩ version installed.

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Also see my comment here:

1 Like
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Agreed! I suppose if the only helpful bit from my post is that if Anki doesn’t open and there are no obvious error messages, it may be due to GPU issues and the Anki manual section on display issues (2.1.4) might help. Thanks!

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