Obsidian fails to start after AMD driver update

Help
1

Steps to reproduce

After installing the latest driver for AMD RX 480 (whql-amd-software-adrenalin-edition-26.5.2-win11-may-vega-polaris.exe), Obsidian fails to start.Even disabling GPU acceleration does not solve the issue.

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]

N, used Gemini to find a command line workaround that exposed the bug.

Expected result

Obsidian launches

Actual result

PS C:\Users\user1> & “$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\obsidian\Obsidian.exe”PS C:\Users\user1>GPU Acceleration disabled.2026-05-31 06:49:46 Loaded main app package C:\Users\user1\AppData\Local\Programs\obsidian\resources\obsidian.asar2026-05-31 06:49:46 Checking for update using Github2026-05-31 06:49:46 Success.2026-05-31 06:49:46 Latest version is 1.12.72026-05-31 06:49:46 App is up to date.[18300:0531/084946.532:FATAL:content\browser\gpu\gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc:415] GPU process isn’t usable. Goodbye.

Environment

Additional information

launching with these flags worksPS C:\Users\user1> & “$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\obsidian\Obsidian.exe” --disable-gpu --disable-gpu-sandbox --disable-software-rasterizer

2

Moved to help section for not filling the BR template completely and you didn’t follow the troubleshooting guide.

This seems a GPU driver problem of AMD, so maybe contact them.

3

It may be an issue with Electron but Obsidian could detect the issue and fallback to –disable-gpu-sandbox

If javascript/typescript has a catch block you could catch the error and apply a workaround instead of waiting for users to use the flag and manually fix it.