Chimera Not Using Graphics Card

[andhale@…]

Hello Chimera Team,
I just did a fresh install of kubuntu (ubuntu distro w/ KDE plasma in place
of gnome). I installed the newest nvidia driver, and it appears to be
installed correctly according to the nvidia-smi command (driver
version 575.57.08
) Despite this. ChimeraX (also fresh install version 1.10.1) does not
appear to be using my graphics card. When doing some light monitoring of
GPU performance while using chimera, I don't see it utilizing the gpu
(sorry I did not script the command so I don't have more info for you).
After some sleuthing I ra the graphics driver command and got this output
OpenGL version: 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 25.0.7-0ubuntu0.25.04.1
OpenGL renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 256 bits)
OpenGL vendor: Mesa
After some sleuthing I see the the llvmpipe means it is using my CPU. Which
seems to confirm my previous suspicions. Games I have run on my machine
seem to be using the GPU fine which makes me believe it is a problem with
the handshake between chimera and my driver. Is there some kind of command
where I can point to the driver verbosely or something else of that nature?
Thank you,
Andrew  Hale

[pett]

Reported by Andrew Hale

[Greg Couch]

I have seen a similar error on our Ubuntu system. If I recall correctly, there where multiple Nvidia drivers installed. First run

dpkg-query --list | grep -i '^i.*nvidia'

to see all of the Nvidia packages you have. Then remove the old ones and reboot.

[Tom Goddard]

Another problem we have seen is with the Wayland windowing system ChimeraX uses Mesa instead of the Nvidia driver. That apparently has something to do with Nvidia drivers and Wayland not getting along. But if games are using your Nvidia driver under Wayland then ChimeraX should be able to also.

[andhale@…]

Hello,
I am unsure if you will receive this. But it was multiple drivers
installed. I changed on my system settings which driver was being used and
this fixed the issue. No need to uninstall drivers. It appears that it
wasn't only Chimera that wasn't utilizing my graphics card as nvidia-smi
now shows much more activity. Strange that certain applications were fine
though (specifically games).
Thank you for the tips,
Andrew

On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 2:21 PM ChimeraX <ChimeraX-bugs-admin@cgl.ucsf.edu>
wrote:

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