Annoying flickering in 16.04 LTS - Chrome

After some research, I found a solution to this problem. It is working for me now.

I disabled hardware acceleration for my browser from

Settings > Advance Settings > System > uncheck the hardware acceleration

Hope this works on your machine.

I am using google-chrome-stable Version 50.0.2661.94 (64-bit) on Ubuntu 16.04

-----EDIT----

If you encounter scrolling lag and screen tear. Do as suggested by Amos Folarin in the comment below:

Go to: chrome://flags/#smooth-scrolling and Enable it.

I had same problem, setting GPU rasterization to 'Force-enabled for all layers' seems to be finally working:

I fixed it as follows:

sudo apt-get purge xserver-xorg-video-intel

then reboot. This is because Intel drivers moved to modesetting. For more info see this comment in the Chromium bug thread.

Open a terminal and enter this command:

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop

and scroll down until you get to this line:

Exec= chromium-browser

Then add these two parameters

--disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers

Press Ctrl+O to save and Ctrl+X to exit.

Then enter this command:

sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

and add these lines

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "AccelMethod"  "sna"
   Option      "TearFree"    "true"
   Option      "DRI"    "3"
EndSection

Press Ctrl+O then Ctrl+X.

Open Chromium and write to address bar: chrome://flags/ and enter.

• Enable-zero-copy
• Enable Override Software Rendering List
• Enable Display 2D List Canvas

Finally open chrome settings and click on:

• Use hardware acceleration when available

None of these answers seemed to help me. What I ended up doing which seems to have fixed it (My reference was this site http://www.bang-olufsen.com/ which flickered like CRAZY and now it works smoothly) is this:

1.- Navigated to chrome://gpu/. This is what it showed:

2.- I tried fixing the problems one by one. In my case, enabling these flags fixed some of them: GPU rasterization, Override software rendering list. Then it showed like this:

3.- I edited the desktop launcher and added the parameters --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers.

4.- After that, no more problems detected, everything shows as "hardware accelerated" and, more importantly, no more flickering:

If you add the parameters to the launcher first, the list of problems should be shorter and it'll probably be easier to figure out which flags will help you with the problems you have left.

With Chrome Version 51.0.2704.103 (64-bit) the flags

--disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers

do not work anymore.

Best way we can do is step back to Chrome 50 (Version 50.0.2661.86 (64-bit)), here is an instruction how you can step back: how do I downgrade google chrome?

Important is that we put pressure on Google to fix this problem, vote for the bug in Chromium and on the google product page:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=606152

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/CtKF2BiskT8;context-place=forum/chrome

chrome://flags/ > GPU rasterization > Enable,

This finally worked for me! Found it at the bottom of this Google Form! https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/CtKF2BiskT8/dLXKfU2XAQAJ

I think I found the solution:

flags --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers and also enable-zero-copy ENABLE

    sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf
    Section "Device"
       Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
       Driver      "intel"
       Option      "AccelMethod"  "sna"
       Option      "TearFree"    "true"
       Option      "DRI"    "3"
    EndSection

Try loading with some GPU options disabled:

--disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers

After you try that you can also fiddle with some of the rendering settings in about://flags and see if anything there helps, but the bulk of my render flickers were solved by the two command line flags. If you have a launcher .desktop file add those flags to the top Exec entry before the '%U'. You can also add them to the other Exec entries to have the flags applied to all startup modes.

I found the present fixes do not work for current version of chrome, further things need to be changed (at least for my setup).

I can confirm this works (removes both flicker and tearing) -- with thanks to https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=606152#c72

Computer: XPS13 9343 Graphics: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Broadwell-U Integrated Graphics (rev 09) Chrome version: Version 54.0.2840.100 (64-bit)

Settings

1) Check the error messages before and after config adjustments below

• chrome://gpu
• take a screenshot so you can compare after.

2) Edit(for chrome): /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop or for (chromium): /usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop

• Add the flags --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers
• line should look like this: Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers %U

3) sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf add this (you may need to create the file):

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "AccelMethod"  "sna"
   Option      "TearFree"    "true"
   Option      "DRI"    "3"
EndSection

4) Chrome flags settings: chrome://flags:

• Enable ("zero copy rasterizer"): chrome://flags/#enable-zero-copy
• Enable (enable display list 2d canvas): chrome://flags/#enable-display-list-2d-canvas
• Enable ("Override software rendering list"): chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blacklist
• Enable "Display list 2D canvas"): chrome://flags/#enable-display-list-2d-canvas
• Enable (chrome flag for smooth scrolling in linux): chrome://flags/#smooth-scrolling

5) I kept the Chrome Setting> Advanced > Use Hardware Acceleration when available [keep checked]. If you unchecking this really hits performance (although does reduce flickering but not tearing), the above options worked much better for me.

6) Restart the computer.

7) Compare settings. chrome://gpu

This totally eliminated the flickering and tearing for me.