Crash in Zed: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (driver 590.48.01)

[nathansizemore]

First reported with zed here.

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Been tracing and debugging since reporting, and have a summary here. Basically with this icd and raytracing params present it crashes. If we disable raytracing (patching local blade checkout), things start just fine.

• The immediate failure is in NVIDIA’s Vulkan ICD: vkCreateDevice returns VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED only when the ray‑tracing stack is enabled.
• There are no validation errors, so the API usage is spec‑valid.
• That makes this very likely a driver bug, but it is triggered by Blade enabling RT features/extensions at device creation.

NVIDIA Crash Details (Hyprland + NVIDIA dGPU default)

Summary

Zed crashes on startup because Vulkan vkCreateDevice fails inside the NVIDIA ICD with VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED. The failure happens during GPU context initialization in blade_graphics and is not accompanied by any Vulkan validation layer errors (no VUIDs emitted).

Environment

• Zed build: 0.224.0+dev.4389ebb6f48562eb8432cfd85cca81e7b43dc88f
• OS: Arch Linux (rolling)
• Session: Wayland (Hyprland)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (device_id 0x2860)
• Driver: NVIDIA 590.48.01

Crash Site

• Panic message: Unable to init GPU context
• Path: crates/gpui/src/platform/linux/wayland/client.rs -> BladeContext::new() -> blade_graphics::Context::init(...)
• Vulkan error reported by blade_graphics: Platform(Init(ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED))

Vulkan Validation Results

• VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation was enabled.
• No validation errors or VUIDs were emitted before the failure.

API Dump Findings

The API dump layer captured the exact vkCreateDevice call and showed it returned VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED.

Enabled Device Extensions

• VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block
• VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore
• VK_KHR_descriptor_update_template
• VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering
• VK_KHR_swapchain
• VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations
• VK_KHR_acceleration_structure
• VK_KHR_ray_query
• VK_AMD_buffer_marker
• VK_KHR_external_memory
• VK_KHR_external_memory_fd

Feature Chain (pNext) at vkCreateDevice

• VkPhysicalDeviceRayQueryFeaturesKHR::rayQuery = 1
• VkPhysicalDeviceAccelerationStructureFeaturesKHR::accelerationStructure = 1
• VkPhysicalDeviceBufferDeviceAddressFeatures::bufferDeviceAddress = 1
• VkPhysicalDeviceDescriptorIndexingFeatures:
  • shaderSampledImageArrayNonUniformIndexing = 1
  • shaderStorageBufferArrayNonUniformIndexing = 1
  • descriptorBindingPartiallyBound = 1
  • (most other descriptor indexing fields = 0)
• VkPhysicalDeviceDynamicRenderingFeatures::dynamicRendering = 1
• VkPhysicalDeviceTimelineSemaphoreFeatures::timelineSemaphore = 1
• VkPhysicalDeviceInlineUniformBlockFeatures::inlineUniformBlock = 1

Trigger Isolation (Confirmed)

Disabling the ray tracing stack via BLADE_DISABLE_RAY_TRACING=1 allows Zed to launch successfully. This isolates the failure to the ray tracing extensions and feature chain:

• VK_KHR_acceleration_structure
• VK_KHR_ray_query
• VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations
• VkPhysicalDeviceRayQueryFeaturesKHR
• VkPhysicalDeviceAccelerationStructureFeaturesKHR
• VkPhysicalDeviceBufferDeviceAddressFeaturesKHR

With these disabled, the NVIDIA ICD no longer returns VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED during vkCreateDevice.