Substance Designer crashes on startup

Forum|Forum|7 days ago
September 2, 2026
2 replies
15 views

Hello,

Substance 3D Designer crashes instantly when trying to start the program.

Substance Painter works fine and Designer was not installed on this machine before today.

My OS is Windows 11

Louise24043630919a

Adobe Employee

Hey Merlin! sorry that happens to you :( When you say “instantly” would you be able to precise the moment it happens? Is it right after the splashscreen, or when you try to create/open a graph?

M

Merlin5D90Author

Participant

Hello,
after a lot of hours troubleshooting and trying to isolate any program that might interfere with adobe Designer startup I was finally able to find a solution to this problem.

My workstation is equipped with two 5090 GPU’s and it seems like Designer was unable to select one of them on startup.
The crash log hinted at it, but it never listed any specific error and i was unable to find anything in windows event viewer either. Only using Process Monitor and isolating anythingt related to Designer finally gave me a clear answer.

Is this behavior a known problem? Substance Painter is running just fine, which is why I didn’t suspect that my dual GPU setup might be the issue for the longest time.

The crash occured immediately during the splash screen. I wasn’t even able to get into the user interface.

Greetings, Merlin

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