TL;DR - Cubase might crash under Hybrid GPU mode - any tips or settings recommendations?
Hi everyone, Cubase is crashing my new laptop (Lenovo Ideapad Pro 5 - Ryzen AI 7 350 + RTX5050) under very specific circumstances:
When running on battery power and opening some sort of graphically demanding plugin (happens most consistently with Fabfilter Twin 3 but also others) it freezes leading to black screen and an immediate restart, no BSOD even.
After some testing I believe this is caused by Windows switching between the iGPU (radeon 860m) and the RTX5050 when detecting the graphics load, perhaps leading to some sort of voltage spike the battery can’t sustain or triggering some protection.
This does not happen when charging, and the only solution I found consistent is forcing Cubase to use the iGPU only, as even forcing it to use the dGPU will not persist when multitasking - which leads to a crash when switching back to Cubase.
I tested some GPU benchmarks and games to eliminate it being some general GPU issue but so far this happens only with Cubase.
I know running Cubase i=on battery is not a very realistic use case but I wanted to see if this is a known issue as I’m worried something might be wrong with my laptop. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks.
From my experience you can use the Lenovo vantage to turn off hybrid mode. You can also go to Windows settings/ system/ display/ graphics/ add a desktop app. Browse for “C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 14\Cubase14.exe” and set the GPU preference to high performance graphics card. That’s what I do on my ‘21 Legion laptop and it seems to get me by, although when I run it I generally keep it plugged in so the vram on the GPU isn’t limited. It’s worth a shot, I hope it works out for you.
Thanks for the suggestions! As far as I can tell it’s not possible to disable the iGPU on my model - only the dGPU…
I tried the preference trick on graphics settings but sadly the moment I switch to any other program that is not set to performance graphics the laptop will default to iGPU. That way when I return to Cubase it crashes regardless.
Again this is a very odd use-case and I found a workaround (setting Cubase to power-saving graphics completely sidesteps the issue) but I wanted to see if this is a known issue or whether my laptop has something wrong with it.
IGPU can be disabled through its driver in the Device Manager under Display Adapters and or Graphics Device settings under the Configurations Menu in BIOS (if available).
I tried disabling the driver, I can confirm it actually stops the crashing, however graphics performance is atrocious. I believe all programs still utilized the iGPU but without the driver it could not operate optimally. the framerate was as low as 10-15 if I had to guess.
Sadly no such option in my BIOS…
