Windows display issues
On Windows, there are three ways of content being displayed on screen. The default is software, which is slower, but the most compatible. There are two other options that are faster: OpenGL and ANGLE. They are faster, but they may not work, or may cause display issues such as missing menubars, blank windows, and so on. Which one works best will depend on your computer.
If and how you can change this display method depends on which Anki version you are using, more precisely on the version of the used Qt toolkit.
Qt5
This toolkit is used by all Anki versions prior to 2.1.50. Here, the display driver can be adjusted via the Tools>Preferences menu. Make sure you restart Anki after adjusting it.
If you’re unable to get to Anki’s preferences screen, and restarting Anki a few times does not help, you may need to manually adjust the graphics driver. You can do this by starting cmd.exe and typing the following:
echo auto > %APPDATA%\Anki2\gldriver
It will not print anything. You can then start Anki again.
The default is software; the other two drivers you can try are angle and auto.
Qt6
Anki 2.1.50+ is available with the more recent Qt6 toolkit. The new toolkit defaults to having graphics acceleration enabled. If you run into display issues, you can try switching to software mode via cmd:
echo software > %APPDATA%\Anki2\gldriver6
Or you can do it via PowerShell:
echo software > $env:APPDATA\Anki2\gldriver6
It will not print anything. You can then start Anki again.
To revert to the default behaviour, change software to auto, or delete that file.
In Anki 23.10+, you can also change the graphics driver from preferences screen.
Full screen
Anki 2.1.50+ comes with a full screen mode, but due to various issues, it had to
be disabled while OpenGL is used. Turning on software rendering as described
above will allow the full screen option to be used, though please bear in mind
that rendering performance may suffer.
In Anki 23.10+, full screen mode is supported with the default Direct3D driver.