I've upgraded from 4.4.0 to 4.4.8 and then 4.5.2 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit, and it's still happening.
At 4.5.2 it's even more frequent, and mainly in Chrome (haven't tried firefox or opera just yet). Every time I open a new web page. Any way to fix that, or is it a bug?
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 5500 (rev 09)
04:00.0 Display controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Venus XTX [Radeon HD 8890M / R9 M275X/M375X] (rev 81)
Cheers.
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 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.
Finally open chrome settings and click on:
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
2) Edit(for chrome): /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop or for (chromium): /usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop
Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers %U3) 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:
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.
Disabling hardware acceleration will degrade your browsers performance for the pages having animations and other processor intensive tasks.
However, if you don't have any GPU installed in your system then the approach of disabling hardware acceleration suggested by sgiri is best for you.
But I have an NVidia GPU installed in my laptop and I am using Ubuntu desktop OS. So I installed the proprietary binary driver (version 352.63). It worked for me, hope will work in your Ubuntu system too.
