After Effects 26.2 crashes in nvwgf2umx.dll with RTX 5090 + RTX 3090

Issue

After Effects intermittently crashes shortly after opening a project or when the first effect/render work begins on a Windows workstation with two NVIDIA GPUs from different generations (RTX 5090 + RTX 3090). Every analyzed crash is a stack overflow inside NVIDIA's Direct3D user-mode driver. Disabling the RTX 3090 in Windows Device Manager makes the same projects stable across repeated launches, without changing the project or After Effects settings.

Steps to reproduce

1. On Windows 11, enable both an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 3090 in Device Manager.
2. Install NVIDIA Studio Driver 610.62. The issue also reproduced with 610.74. Driver 610.62 was installed after DDU cleanup in Safe Mode.
3. Start After Effects 26.2.0 (Build 49).
4. Open a project that causes initial render/device work. The captured case used one image layer and one GPU-accelerated third-party effect.
5. Wait for the project to finish opening and for After Effects to initialize/render the composition. If it does not crash, close After Effects and repeat the launch/open cycle.

Expected result

The project opens and renders normally with both supported NVIDIA GPUs enabled.

Actual result

After Effects intermittently terminates with exception 0xC00000FD (STACK_OVERFLOW). WinDbg identifies nvwgf2umx.dll as the faulting module. The repeating stack contains:

• NVAPI_DirectMethods
• NVDEV_Thunk
• NVENCODEAPI_Thunk
• SetDependencyInfo

The crash occurs after the project opens and around Direct3D device/render initialization. The After Effects log's last visible ZANZIBAR-2 line is not itself the exception: the same line appears in a successful session that rendered 201 frames and closed normally.

System

• After Effects: 26.2.0 (Build 49)
• OS: Windows 11 Pro, build 10.0.26200.8737, x64
• GPU 0: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, PCI 17:00.0
• GPU 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, PCI 65:00.0
• NVIDIA Studio Driver: 610.62 (clean DDU installation); also reproduced on 610.74
• AE logs show GPUFoundation initializing both CUDA(0) and CUDA(1)

Comparative information / isolation

• Reproduced on both NVIDIA Studio Driver 610.74 and clean-installed 610.62.
• Reproduced with Mercury GPU Acceleration.
  • Reproduced with Mercury Software Only and with “Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage Panels” disabled. AE still initialized both NVIDIA devices.
• The same project can also open successfully and render 201 frames, showing the crash is timing-dependent rather than deterministic project corruption.
• With the RTX 3090 disabled in Device Manager, repeated launches of the same projects completed without a crash.
• No third-party plugin frame appears in the captured exception stack. A GPU effect may trigger GPU activity, but the captured recursive stack and exception are entirely inside nvwgf2umx.dll.

Workaround

Disable the RTX 3090 in Device Manager before launching After Effects, leaving only the RTX 5090 enabled.

Attachments

A 184.7 MB full process dump is available privately to Adobe on request. It is not included publicly because process dumps can contain user data and proprietary development identifiers.