Chrome causing weird flickering since upgrade to 85.0.4183.83

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.

Chrome pixel glitches

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

enter image description here

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


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.


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.