macOS – Nvidia

Blender uses of OpenGL for the 3D Viewport and user interface. The graphics card (GPU) and driver have a big impact on Blender’s behavior and performance.

This section lists possible solutions for graphics glitches, problems with EEVEE and Cycles, and crashes related to your GPU.

Drivers

Upgrading to the latest graphics drivers often solves problems. Newer drivers have bug fixes that help Blender function correctly.

On macOS graphics drivers are built into the operating system and the only way to get newer drivers is to upgrade macOS as a whole to the latest version.

Common Problems

Unsupported Graphics Driver Error

This means your graphics card and driver do not have the minimum required OpenGL 3.3 version needed by Blender.

Installing the latest driver can help upgrade the OpenGL version, though some graphics cards are simply too old to run the latest Blender. Using Blender 2.79 or earlier is the only option then.

Crash on Startup

Try running Blender from the command line, to see if any helpful error messages are printed.

On Windows, graphics drivers can sometimes get corrupted. In this case it can help to uninstall all graphics drivers (there may be multiple from Intel, AMD and Nvidia) and perform a clean installation with drivers from the manufacturer’s website.

Poor Performance

  • Update your graphics drivers (see above).

  • On laptops, make sure you are using a dedicated GPU (see above).

  • Try lowering quality settings in Preferences ‣ System ‣ Memory & Limits.

  • Try undoing settings in your graphics drivers, if you made any changes there.

Render Errors

See EEVEE and Cycles documentation respectively.

Wrong Selection in 3D Viewport

See Invalid Selection, Disable Anti-Aliasing.

Virtual Machines

Running Blender inside a virtual machine is known to have problems when OpenGL drawing calls are forwarded to the host operating system.

To resolve this, configure the system to use PCI passthrough.

Information

To find out which graphics card and driver Blender is using, use Help ‣ Save System Info inside Blender. The OpenGL section will have information about your graphics card, vendor and driver version.