RStudio crashes at startup, probably due to graphics driver issue

[chernavsky]

For the past several months, I have not been able to run RStudio on my 64-bit Windows 10 machine (ver. 21H1). The issue seems to be related to my AMD graphics drivers. My graphics card is an AMD Radeon RX570. When I attempt to launch RStudio, nothing happens on the screen. It doesn't start at all. Windows Event Viewer shows the following entry:

Faulting application name: rstudio.exe, version: 1.4.1717.0, time stamp: 0x60ac3b38
Faulting module name: atig6txx.dll, version: 27.20.22001.14011, time stamp: 0x60cbddd4
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000018c21
Faulting process id: 0x6f0c
Faulting application start time: 0x01d79ff9dbcae923
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\RStudio\bin\rstudio.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\u0368925.inf_amd64_05ef22929fd9ebfc\B368707\atig6txx.dll
Report Id: 8e1a70a9-5609-42c7-9971-46f913b95565
Faulting package full name: 
Faulting package-relative application ID: 

A couple of days ago, I installed an upgrade to the Radeon graphics drivers. RStudio started launching normally afterwards, but just for a day. Now it's back to crashing at start-up again. Not sure how to explain the fact that it worked briefly but then stopped working again.

Is there some workaround for this?

[andresrcs]

Have you tried changing to software rendering?, you can change it by holding the Ctrl key while opening RStudio, then you should see this menu and change the "Rendering Engine" to "Software".

[chernavsky]

Thanks, but there's no difference in behavior when I hold down the ctrl key. I don't see the menu that you posted, and Windows Event Viewer still shows the same crash report.

Also, I edited the desktop.ini file and changed the second line to "desktop.renderingEngine=software" (before I edited it, the line said "=auto"). No difference in behavior -- I see the same crash report in Event Viewer.

[chernavsky]

I figured out how to fix the problem, and I'm posting this here in case someone else ends up having the same issue.

I launched the Radeon graphics software and made two configuration changes:

Under the "Global Graphics" section, I changed the Graphics Profile to "Gaming". On that same page, I clicked on "Advanced", and changed the second-to-last setting ("GPU Workload") from Graphics to Compute.

I'm not sure if both of these changes were necessary or not. Maybe one or the other would have been enough. But I changed them both at the same time, and RStudio started working, so I didn't mess with it any further.

I hope this solution helps someone else.