Isaac Sim 4.5 not working on Windows 11 via WSL2?

Omniverse Isaac Sim
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Hi @gregoryjabido,

This is a GPU architecture compatibility issue, not a driver problem.

Root Cause: Isaac Sim 4.5 was released before the RTX 50-series (Blackwell) GPUs existed. The error message makes this clear:

“GPU 1 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU) with CUDA compute capability 12.0 is unsupported by this version of iray photoreal”

Isaac Sim 4.5’s RTX rendering pipeline and iray engine don’t have the necessary code paths for Blackwell’s SM 12.0 architecture. No driver change will fix this.

Solution: Upgrade to Isaac Sim 5.1.0 or later.

The Isaac Sim 5.1 requirements now list RTX 5080 as a supported GPU with minimum driver 580.88 (Windows).

Since you mentioned Isaac Sim 5.1 works on Linux with the same hardware, you should be able to:

  1. Install Isaac Sim 5.1.0 workstation on Windows
  2. Use driver 580.88 (recommended) or 591.74 (confirmed working per forum post #365335)
  3. If GUI crashes occur, try forcing D3D12 renderer: --/renderer/active=d3d12

The ROS 2 bridge extension (isaacsim.ros2.bridge) is available in 5.1 with similar functionality.

Note: If you specifically need Isaac Sim 4.5 for project compatibility reasons, you’ll need a pre-Blackwell GPU (RTX 40-series or earlier).