Flickering and graphical glitches when graphics acceleration enabled

Brave Browser Desktop Support
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1

Description of the issue:

Brave produces black flickering or graphical overlaps from one tab or other tabs, appearing on the browser itself or the on-screen tab. The flickering/flashing appears as black patches of different sizes or sometimes a part of the rendered page within the same tab, and sometimes from another tab, that overlaps with the one viewed on screen.

Some discussions related to this issue suggest disabling the Use graphics acceleration when available feature in Settings. This evidently solved my issue, but will cause Brave to be more CPU-bound and considerably affect my experience, thus it is not a desirable solution. Another way that actually solves this issue with graphics acceleration enabled is to change the flag in brave://flags/#use-angle to D3D9.
Adjusting it to Default or D3D11 reproduces this flickering, while D3D11 WARP produces the same effect as disabling graphics acceleration, causing heavy CPU utilization.

Steps to Reproduce:

  1. Launch Brave with graphics acceleration enabled.
  2. Stay on new tab, or visit any website (e.g. YouTube).

Actual Result:

Flickering/flashing and graphical glitches appear on a part of the page or the browser.

brave-browser-bug-1
brave-browser-bug-11920×1080 509 KB

brave-browser-bug-2
brave-browser-bug-21920×1080 434 KB

Expected Result:

Browser and page are viewed properly and not graphical flaws occur with graphics acceleration enabled.

Reproduces how often:

When graphics acceleration is enabled and the #use-angle flag is not set to D3D9.

Brave Version:

Brave 1.83.118 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Chromium: 141.0.7390.108

Reproducible on current live release:

Yes

Additional information:

Windows 10 22H2 Home Single Language
OS Build 19045.6332
Intel Core i5-10300H
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 (Driver version 576.28) (connected to monitor Acer Nitro QG241Y 180Hz)

2

@rrinnlonginus

Good report.

Test extensions: one-at-a-time; and then test combinations; and also test order of installation.

Test a new Brave Browser user profile.

Also something might help(?): ‘https://windowsreport.com/windows-11-best-display-settings/’

Sometimes the Appearance theme - Brave Browser Settings?

3

Hey @289wk,

Thanks for replying with suggestions. I think I’ve solved the problem by simply updating my graphics driver to the latest version, as NVIDIA did mention they fix a general flickering bug in some games and others – the flickering/flashing now do not occur with graphics acceleration enabled and ANGLE backend using D3D11.

Before finally updating the graphics driver, I did try some of your suggestions:

  • None of the extensions I enabled individually or a combination of them affects the flickering issue.
  • I did not test with a new user profile as I did not want to bother to do so just yet.
  • The article you attached did have some plausible suggestions but I only end up with calibrating colors, as all the other stuff were already and at optimal settings.
  • I did not try switching Brave’s appearance theme from Dark.

Simply updating the graphics driver to the latest version with the general flickering issue addressed solved it. Thank you for the help.