NVIDIA graphics

What Cordial does on NVIDIA GPUs, the known driver problems, and what to try if the game will not start or crashes.

Most of this page is untested on NVIDIA hardware. Two users have reported runs: driver 610.57 in the Flatpak (2026-10-01, fullscreen in and out held), and an RTX 4070 on 615.71.09 under KDE on Wayland (2026-10-03), which booted and rendered, got through one resize and fullscreen session, and crashed once at startup in eight launches. Nothing below has been run on a hybrid laptop or a 535/550 driver. What follows is what people running the same Roblox engine (through Sober) have reported, what Cordial does about the reports it can act on, and what to try. Where something is a guess it says so.

If you have an NVIDIA card, the tester plan in analysis/nvidia-support.md is the most useful thing you can do for this page.

What Cordial does on NVIDIA

It decides by the GPU the game is drawing on, not by whether an NVIDIA driver is loaded, so a laptop that renders on its Intel or AMD chip is left alone (ADR-046).

• Prints which GPU it uses at start, for every vendor: [android] vulkan: physical device "..." vendor 0x10de. 0x10de is NVIDIA.
• Warns about driver series 535 and 550. On Roblox builds from June 2026 those drivers were reported to crash the game the first time the window is resized. Untested here.
• Asks again if the driver refuses to list the display’s present modes, the vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfacePresentModesKHR failed error some two-GPU laptops hit on the first launch after boot. A guess: it may not help.
• Says so, in a Flatpak, if the sandbox’s NVIDIA driver does not match your machine’s, on the crash page and in cordial --diagnostics (the Graphics line).
• Checks the same things in cordial --doctor and the report screen: the driver series, whether a Flatpak’s GL extension matches your driver, and whether nvidia-drm has modeset on (details).
• Adds a hint to the crash page when the game stops after any of the above, or after RBXCRASH: OutOfMemory, on an NVIDIA GPU.

It does not switch renderer, window system or GPU for you.

Problems and what to try

Symptom	Try
Game closes as the window first appears or is resized (driver 535 or 550)	Update to driver 580 or newer, or set Settings, Graphics, Renderer to OpenGL ES and relaunch. OpenGL ES has been shown to reach the landing page, not to be stable in play
Game exits at start with vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfacePresentModesKHR failed (two-GPU laptop)	Use the NVIDIA GPU once after boot before launching, see Laptops with two GPUs
Window will not appear, or the compositor drops it (Wayland)	CORDIAL_X11=1 for the game. The cost: the embedded web windows do not attach on X11
No NVIDIA GPU found, or the integrated one is used and it runs slowly (Flatpak)	The sandbox’s driver does not match yours, see Flatpak
RBXCRASH: OutOfMemoryGraphics some minutes into a big place	See Out of graphics memory

Drivers

No minimum driver version has been established, so none is claimed.

• GTX 10-series and older (Pascal, Maxwell): 580 is the newest driver they can use, so “update to 580” is the ceiling.
• Wayland: nvidia-drm.modeset=1 is needed on drivers before 595, which turns it on itself. Explicit sync needs driver 555 or newer, kernel 6.8 or newer and a compositor that supports it (KWin 6.1, Mutter 46.1, Hyprland 0.42, Sway 1.11).
• __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS, __GL_YIELD and __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK are for OpenGL. They do nothing for this renderer.

Laptops with two GPUs

If the game exits at start with vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfacePresentModesKHR failed, several people got past it by using the NVIDIA GPU once after boot before launching: vulkaninfo, or switcherooctl glxgears. It is a once-per-boot effect in their reports.

To make the game use the NVIDIA GPU rather than the Intel or AMD one, people report that these work. They are not Cordial settings and are untested here:

__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only cordial-shell
flatpak override --user --env=__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 \
  --env=__VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only io.github.luohoa97.Cordial

Check the physical device line in the output afterwards. If it names the wrong GPU, nothing else about your setup matters yet.

Flatpak

The Flatpak carries its own copy of the NVIDIA driver, as an extension named org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-<version>, and it has to match the driver on your machine exactly. When it does not, the sandbox has only the open-source drivers: Cordial finds no NVIDIA GPU, or quietly uses the integrated one.

flatpak list | grep GL.nvidia        # what the sandbox has
cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version      # what your machine runs
flatpak update

After a driver update on your machine, Flathub can be a day behind; wait, or install the older version. cordial --diagnostics prints the Graphics line that compares the two. There is nothing to do on the AppImage or a native package; they use your machine’s driver directly.

Out of graphics memory

RBXCRASH: OutOfMemoryGraphics, some minutes into a big place. It is reported for NVIDIA’s proprietary driver on every version up to the newest checked. The Sober maintainers consider it a driver problem and nobody has a fix. Sober’s own warning recommends lowering the graphics quality heavily.

Some people reported success with these in flags.json. The names exist in the engine; the effect is untested here, did nothing for several people, and values above 2 crashed one:

{ "DFFlagTextureQualityOverrideEnabled": true, "DFIntTextureQualityOverride": 2 }

The “video memory: 64 MiB” line in the log is the engine’s fixed figure on every vendor, not a sign your card is misread.

There is no known way to raise it, and the figure is not what allocation is decided on. Measured 2026-10-03 on a 12 GiB RTX 4070: DFIntEstimatedGmaSafeVideoMemoryMB, the one flag name in Roblox’s own settings document that speaks of video memory, moved nothing — the line still read caps.videoMemory = 67108864 with the flag set to 8192, in a run where override delivery was proven in the same session (DFIntTaskSchedulerTargetFps=30 holding 30.0 presents a second). A relayed Roblox maintainer statement (Sober #2077) says the figure is hard-coded and not what allocation is decided on. Do not spend a session on it.

What Cordial does not do

It does not apply FStringGraphicsVulkanShaderMTDenyPattern or patch NVIDIA’s driver library the way Sober does for one problem. The reasons are in ADR-046 and ADR-001. The flag works from flags.json if you want to test it; the test is in the analysis page.

Reporting a problem

Use Report a Problem in the main menu, or run cordial --diagnostics and paste the block, including the Graphics line. Add:

1. The physical device line from the output when you launch from a terminal.
2. vulkaninfo --summary, nvidia-smi and cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version.
3. The archive from Report a Problem → Save logs…, which already holds the launcher’s and the client’s output (the last twenty lines of a crash are in it) and the engine’s newest logs. For a freeze, do not kill it yet; see analysis/nvidia-support.md.

The catalogue of known NVIDIA failures, with issue numbers, evidence and the test plan, is analysis/nvidia-support.md.