Android Studio, Suddenly got GPU Driver Issue when running emulator

Question

I have a laptop that I mainly use for android development on android studio, today all of the sudden got this error message (or an outdated version of it) when i ran my emulator

Your GPU driver information:  GPU #1 Make: 8086 Model: Intel(R) HD Graphics Family Device ID: 0a16 Driver version: 10.18.10.3945 GPU #2 Make: 10de Model: NVIDIA GeForce 820M Device ID: 1140 Driver version: 22.21.13.8476   Some users have experienced emulator stability issues with this driver version. As a result, were selecting a compatibility renderer. Please check with your manufacturer to see if there is an updated driver available.  

Updated the geforce driver, but no use, tried to update the intel one but failed, is there a way to disable this? bypass the compatibility renderer and work as I used to, the emulator is awful now. Any explanation why that occurred all of the sudden?

Also I'm using windows 7 64-bit if that will help with anything, had an update few days ago.

Answer 1

I am using Win10 but have the same problem. Emulator started crashing my app after last emulator update. In my case, problem is that emulator does not run on hardware even though I never had a problem with my GPUs. Also, the "GPU driver issue" window that pops up doesn't even label WHICH one of the GPUs it thinks is the problem.

For me the solution that worked is to run emulator from terminal, forcing it to run using hardware graphics (instead of letting emulator decide on which) using command

emulator -avd avd_name -gpu mode 

where mode is host so that it will run with hardware.

For example:

Using Android Studio terminal move to folder where the emulator is located. Default on Win10 is: C:\Users\userName\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\emulator

Find emulator to run by listing available ones: emulator -list-avds

Run emulator with -gpu host option: emulator -avd avd_name -gpu host

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