Cursor is using software rendering making it feel sluggish

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Cursor is using software rendering. The GPU process shows:
–use-gl=angle --use-angle=swiftshader-webgl (software rendering)
GPU process consuming 55.2% CPU
The renderer processes have:
–disable-gpu-compositing flag
This confirms hardware acceleration is disabled. argv.json:1 does not have a disable-hardware-acceleration flag.

Steps to Reproduce

I dont know, this started after a recent update. I start cursor and it’s extremely sluggish and slow making it unusable, its lagging everywhere.

Expected Behavior

Use hardware acceleration

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.7.28
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: adb0f9e3e4f184bba7f3fa6dbfd72ad0ebb8cfd0
Date: 2025-10-01T02:45:21.769Z (12 hrs ago)
Electron: 34.5.8
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.1
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

2

Hey, thanks for the report. This is definitely a frustrating issue - software rendering can make Cursor feel completely unusable

Try these steps to force hardware acceleration back on:

  1. First, quit Cursor completely
  2. Open Terminal and run: defaults write com.todesktop.230313mzl4w4u92 disable-hardware-acceleration -bool false
  3. Restart Cursor

The issue might be related to recent macOS graphics driver changes or a corrupted preference. You can also check if there’s a ~/.cursor/argv.json file that might have hardware acceleration disabled

Let me know if the Terminal commands help restore hardware acceleration - this should definitely be fixable

3

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