Rayforge crashes on startup on an old Windows laptop

[piit79]

Clean install of Rayforge 1.8.0 crashes on my very old Lattitude E6510 laptop running fully updated Windows 10 with ESU.

The application window is not shown at all, Rayforge crashes before the window is created.

Attaching a debug log: session-2026-06-30_14-46-16.log

I'm a long time Linux guy, but I'm forced to run new versions of LightBurn on an old Windows laptop. I wanted to test the experimental Ruida support in Rayforge, so I tried running it on the same system.

Any idea what could be causing this? Perhaps an old graphics driver? Any other steps to debug the crash? Thanks!

[knipknap]

Thanks for the detailed report and the debug log, @piit79. I've looked into this and I can see what's happening.

The log shows that Rayforge actually gets pretty far through startup -- it loads all the importers, exporters, and renderers, initializes the worker pool, loads the addons, builds the main window UI with all the canvas layers, and sets up the property panels. Then the log just stops abruptly, which tells me the crash happens right at the point where the window is being presented on screen.

The crash is caused by the 3D canvas. Rayforge uses an OpenGL-based 3D view that requires OpenGL 3.3 support. Your Latitude E6510 has a GPU from around 2010, and the driver on Windows 10 likely only supports OpenGL 2.1 at most. When GTK tries to create the OpenGL context for the 3D canvas during window realization, the old graphics driver crashes hard -- this isn't a graceful Python exception, it's a native crash in the driver itself, which is why there's no error message in the log.

I should add better error handling here so the app can gracefully fall back to 2D-only mode instead of crashing. But in the meantime, you should be able to work around this by setting an environment variable before launching Rayforge:

set RAYFORGE_DISABLE_3D=1

Then start Rayforge from the same command prompt. This will skip the OpenGL initialization entirely and run in 2D-only mode. You won't have the 3D preview, but everything else -- including the Ruida support you wanted to test -- should work fine.

I'll look into making this more robust so it either detects the OpenGL version up front or catches the crash during 3D canvas creation and falls back automatically.

[piit79]

Thanks for the quick response and the detailed write-up. I'm sorry to waste your time with such and old laptop that's barely usable by now (especially on Windows...).

After setting RAYFORGE_DISABLE_3D=1, the startup got a lot further, but unfortunately the app still crashed. I'm attaching updated log below if you want to take a look, but please don't spend too much of your valuable time on it. I'll need to start using a better laptop soon anyway as even LightBurn is bugging me that the display resolution is too low... :)

session-2026-07-02_12-56-25.log

[knipknap]

Thanks for testing and for the new log. Unfortunately it has no indication at all what may be going on - all logs are completely normal, until it just stops.

Some users reported they had to install the C++ Redistributable v14 for Windows. See the troubleshooting section here for the link:

https://rayforge.org/docs/getting-started/installation#windows

But I am not sure if this is going to change it.