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I am having a problem with Google Chrome on Ubuntu 12.10 64.

On about 20-30% of web sites the page comes up and starts "flickering". It seems like there is a different or partial rendering of the page in a different buffer and several times per second the page swaps between the two screen buffers, causing a kind of epileptic flashing of different images.

I can also not scroll the page when it is in this flickering state, any attempt to scroll causes the page to go to the top again on the next flicker.

I am using the fglrx driver if that means something:

$ fglrxinfo
display: :0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series
OpenGL version string: 4.2.12002 Compatibility Profile Context 8.961

Chrome version is:

Google Chrome   25.0.1364.172 (Official Build 187217) 

Any ideas?

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  • I have this problem on Ubuntu 14.04 as well. I have noticed that closing programs (especially those that use the gpu) sometimes eliminate the problem. Oct 13, 2015 at 3:43

4 Answers 4

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This is a known issue with ATI/AMD graphics card and compositing.

For some people starting Chrome with --blacklist-accelerated-compositing parameter brings some help. Others report that --disable-gpu parameter helps.

See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136054

As far as i understand, the only real fix is to switch to Nvidia or Intel GPU. Adding parameters like the ones above cost performance and disable certain features which require compositing. To check your Chrome's state of GPU affairs visit chrome://gpu

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  • I think that made the problem worse for me.
    – mpen
    Oct 24, 2013 at 17:09
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Revisiting this page after a month, the problem was that hardware acceleration wasn't enabled. This is apparent on HTML5 videos too!

Go to chrome://flags

Look for “Override Software Rendering List”, i.e. enabling GPU acceleration on unsupported hardware and enable it. Restart Chrome (close the background process if you have that running on the top of the bar) and see if it works for you.

Read more here.

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  • This totally worked on Ubuntu Gnome running on an alienware laptop. Thanks ben lifehacker. Dec 31, 2016 at 14:27
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You might try starting chrome with --disable-gpu.

Reference: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136054

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  • While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes.
    – g_p
    Dec 20, 2014 at 13:22
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    I thought "starting chrome with --disable-gpu" would be the essential part. The link would not even be necessary to help someone (it was in fact added only for reference).
    – jox
    Dec 21, 2014 at 17:06
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This solution very similar to @jox's answer (turning off GPU support fixed this issue for me), but if anyone is curious how to do this, you can simply go to Settings -> "Show advanced settings..." -> System and uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available"

I'm using Ubuntu 15.04 and fglrx from the Ubuntu repos on Chromium 45.0.2454.85.

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