Chrome causing weird flickering since upgrade to 85.0.4183.83

Question

Since updating to Google Chrome 85.0.4183.83 (Official build) on my Ubuntu 20.04.1 machine, Chrome is exhibiting some weird flickering. Especially in the top left corner, chunks of pixels are showing on keyboard input or mouse movements. The following GIF I just recorded on this page while typing this question.

Is there any permanent fix for this behavior? It seems that disabling hardware acceleration in the settings is a workaround for this.

I couldn't find any bug reports on their issue tracker.

Graphics output of inxi:

Graphics:  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Hawaii PRO [Radeon R9 290/390] vendor: ASUSTeK driver: radeon v: kernel 
       bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 1002:67b1 
       Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.8 driver: ati,fbdev unloaded: modesetting,radeon,vesa compositor: gnome-shell 
       resolution: 2560x1440~60Hz, 1920x1200~60Hz 
       OpenGL: renderer: AMD HAWAII (DRM 2.50.0 5.4.0-42-generic LLVM 10.0.0) v: 4.5 Mesa 20.0.8 direct render: Yes 

Output from chrome://gpu

Full output: https://pastebin.com/Lkbe8FuV

Answer 1

In my case, I go to chrome://flags/

Then enable:

#ignore-gpu-blacklist
#enable-vulkan

I don't know if there will be any problems later, but it works for me now.

Answer 2

I raised a bug ticket for this:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1122224#c14

There is already a workaround:

Run with --use-gl=desktop or --use-cmd-decoder=validating

Btw unrelated to this problem, I see your system is using 'ati,fbdev' drivers and DRM 2.45

AFAIK your card should be using either amdgpu (note: the open source driver is called amdgpu, the closed source driver is called amdgpu-pro) or radeonsi, thus enabling DRM 3.x and you should see improved overall graphics performance. The ati driver is a really, really old one.

Answer 3

This issue is fixed in Chrome 86. Please remove workarounds suggested in the other answers especially --use-gl=desktop and --use-cmd-decoder=validating. What those workarounds do is revert to a deprecated renderer. Continued use of that renderer would reduce testing we get from the new more versatile renderer.

Since enabling Vulkan was also suggested as a workaround, I'm personally glad you are trying it out, but beware that the Vulkan implementation is not yet widely tested and isn't considered ready for users. If you do continue using Vulkan, please file bugs under https://crbug.com/new.

Also, to prevent such issues in the future, please consider using (or occasionally trying out) Chrome Beta. The issues there can be fixed in the same version and before reaching the wider audience. To install Chrome Beta: sudo apt install google-chrome-beta.

Cheers!

Answer 4

I disabled hardware acceleration and it works. Settings > Advance Settings > System > uncheck the hardware acceleration

Answer 5

Problems with Chrome browser after suspending the computer on Ubuntu 20.04 seems to be related and the suggested workaround in tiangolo's answer worked for me:

You can kill just the browser's GPU process

• Open the Task Manager:

  • Hit Shift+Esc (as pointed out by @NYCeyes in the comments).
  • Or alternatively, go to the Chrome main menu (3 dots on the top right corner) → More Tools → Task Manager.

• Sort by process Task name.

• Find the process called GPU Process.

• Click on End process.

That will "clean" all the glitchy image noise. And Chrome will immediately create a new GPU process automatically.

Note: You can automatize the process, check Andrew Bruce's answer putting these steps in a script that runs automatically.

I assume the problem is something like the GPU process using memory assuming it has the old state as before the sleep cycle, but it just has some default random noise from the default state. So I imagine Ubuntu doesn't save and restore GPU memory on a sleep cycle (I don't think it should) but the Chrome process doesn't detect that. And by killing the process it "frees" that GPU memory and then Chrome creates a new process that re-generates any needed GPU memory state (that's instant).