AutoCAD crashes when opening or closing drawings on laptops with dual graphic cards

Autodesk Support

Oct 8, 2023

Products and versions covered

Issue:

When opening or closing drawings on laptops with dual graphic cards, AutoCAD crashes. Additionally, AutoCAD performance may be sluggish or a crash can occur with the message "Display driver stopped responding and recovered."

Causes:

The crashes are due to the NVIDIA Optimus and AMD Enduro or "Dynamic Switchable Graphics" video configurations, which are available in newer laptops. Both NVIDIA and AMD have introduced technology that uses a discrete graphic card in addition to the integrated Intel HD GPU. This allows the system to automatically switch between the two in order to save battery power or when more graphics processing is needed. It is this switching that can cause AutoCAD to crash.

Solution:

To resolve this problem, in some laptops, the on-board Intel video can be disabled in the system BIOS. In other cases, launch AutoCAD using the main (discrete) video card.

AutoCAD can be set to use the main video card in the video driver software provided by NVIDIA and AMD (see How to configure Autodesk software to use high performance graphics).

Products:

AutoCAD Products;

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