Android Studio Canary 27.3.6 Brings Android Emulator Support to AMD Windows 10 PCs

Android Emulator 27.3.6 was recently released in the Canary and Dev channels alongside the Android Studio release, bringing a long-awaited feature for AMD users on Windows 10. This new build has finally brought support for running the emulator with hardware acceleration on machines with AMD processors.

Previously, AMD users on Windows 10 were unable to run the Android Emulator with hardware acceleration, which resulted in the emulator running slow, inefficiently, and just generally being frustrating to use as compared to the experience on the Intel platform.

This changes with the new release, which also brings along other changes such as:

• Fixed crashes after initial snapshot load when loading color buffers from the snapshot.
• Fixed potential memory corruption when saving snapshots of OpenGL shader program info logs.
• Fixed potential memory corruption when checking CPUID of the host system.
• On AMD machines running the latest Windows 10 and where Windows Hypervisor Platform can be successfully enabled, the emulator can now boot API level 26+ x86 / x86_64 AVDs in accelerated mode.
  • Warning: We have found that enabling Hyper-V or Windows Hypervisor Platform on many AMD Ryzen machines, especially laptops with Vega GPUs, can cause Windows to become unbootable. We only recommend trying this if your AMD system is already successfully running with Windows Hypervisor Platform enabled.
  • Fix: If Windows has become unbootable because of enabling Windows Hypervisor Platform, disable virtualization in your system BIOS and reboot, which should allow you to disable the feature.

Credits: Reddit User /u/Ssunde2

Android Studio Emulator Developer /u/lfy_google also clarified that hardware acceleration should work on Windows 10 Home systems as well, despite the latter not having a “Hyper-V” option. Just enabling the “Windows Hypervisor Platform” option in Windows Optional Features should do the trick. Furthermore, support for API 25 and below is not yet included; users can expect to see this fixed in the next canary build.