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If Anki fails to launch and freezes at “Starting Anki…” or silently crashes, the cause is often a broken or outdated graphics driver—particularly with AMD Radeon GPUs.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:

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