Broken/corrupt image thumbnails in Chromium, 16.04

Question

Xubuntu 16.04, kernel 4.13, nvidia 390.3

Images often get broken/corrupted in chromium after the browser is rebooted or tabs switched. Have tried clearing/deleting cache, reinstalling chromium. Nothing works.

It wasn't always like this. I cannot remember when it started getting corrupted, but has anyone had similar issues with chromium?

Exhibit A: most-visited thumbnails on Chromium new-tab splash

Exhibit B1: broken images

Exhibit B2: B1 tab, after switching tabs to screencap Exhibit A (note the images get distorted in a different way everytime you change tabs)

Not really interested in FF or other browsers.

Update: Images on chromium are not corrupted on another machine of mine (thinkpad), which has the same chromium settings/extensions, Xubuntu 16.04, 4.13, and theme/appearance. The only differences between the two setups I can think of is the thinkpad is Xubuntu 16.04.1 whereas desktop (corrupt issues) is 16.04.3, and thinkpad has no nvidia.

Is it possible this is middleware issue involving nvidia and display?

Edit: related unanswered SO question Broken images in Google Chrome Ubuntu Gnome

Answer 1

This problem (and another one where chromium fails to repaint its window after I switch virtual consoles) appeared for me when I upgraded from nvidia-384 to nvidia-390. I suspect it has to do with an interaction between chromium's GPU compositing and nVidia's proprietary driver.

Does it go away if you downgrade to nvidia-384?

Does it go away if you run chrome with the --disable-gpu-compositing command line option?

Note: You might have to exit chrome and remove the "Top Sites" and "Top Sites-journal" files from ~/.config/chrome/Default/ in order for the home screen thumbnails to be regenerated.