Q100071: How to disable GPU Acceleration to help diagnose issues in Nuke

SUMMARY

This article explains how to disable the use of the GPU in GPU accelerated nodes in Nuke to help troubleshoot crashes and performance issues.

MORE INFORMATION

If you are experiencing crashes in Nuke, performance issues, or failures to boot the application, then we would recommend disabling the GPU to test whether the graphics card might be a possible cause. To do this, please do the following:

Windows:

Open a Command Prompt and set the following environment variable:
set FN_NUKE_DISABLE_GPU_ACCELERATION=1

Then launch Nuke by running the following command:
"C:\Program Files\Nuke15.1v2\Nuke15.1.exe"

macOS:
Open a terminal and set the following environment variable:
export FN_NUKE_DISABLE_GPU_ACCELERATION=1

Then launch Nuke by running the following command:
/Applications/Nuke15.1v2/Nuke15.1v2.app/Contents/MacOS/Nuke15.1

Linux:
Open a terminal and set the following environment variable:
export FN_NUKE_DISABLE_GPU_ACCELERATION=1

Then launch Nuke by running the following command:
/usr/local/Nuke15.1v2/Nuke15.1


All GPU accelerated nodes in Nuke should now show that the Local GPU is Not available:

If Nuke improves in performance after setting this environment variable then we would recommend that you ensure all your drivers are up to date for your graphics card. Occasionally a new driver release might also be the cause of an issue, so if you started experiencing problems after updating to the latest driver, try rolling back to an earlier version.

If you do need to install a different driver version, then Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) is a great way of removing all GPU drivers so you can do a clean install of the different driver version. DDU can be downloaded from here: https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html