Windows display issues

• Qt5
• Qt6
• Full screen

On Windows, there are three ways of content being displayed on screen. The default is software, which is slower, but the most compatible. There are two other options that are faster: OpenGL and ANGLE. They are faster, but they may not work, or may cause display issues such as missing menubars, blank windows, and so on. Which one works best will depend on your computer.

If and how you can change this display method depends on which Anki version you are using, more precisely on the version of the used Qt toolkit.

Qt5

This toolkit is used by all Anki versions prior to 2.1.50. Here, the display driver can be adjusted via the Tools>Preferences menu. Make sure you restart Anki after adjusting it.

If you’re unable to get to Anki’s preferences screen, and restarting Anki a few times does not help, you may need to manually adjust the graphics driver. You can do this by starting cmd.exe and typing the following:

echo auto > %APPDATA%\Anki2\gldriver

The default is software; the other two drivers you can try are angle and auto.

Qt6

Anki 2.1.50+ is available with the more recent Qt6 toolkit. The new toolkit defaults to having graphics acceleration enabled. If you run into display issues, you can try switching to software mode:

echo software > %APPDATA%\Anki2\gldriver6

To revert to the default behaviour, change software to auto, or delete that file.

Full screen

Anki 2.1.50+ comes with a full screen mode, but due to various issues, it had to be disabled while OpenGL is used. Turning on software rendering as described above will allow the full screen option to be used, though please bear in mind that rendering performance may suffer.