Highlight Diagonal Tears with Intel Graphics (Ubuntu 20.04)

Problem:

Despite reinstalling everything I can think of I am having an issue with certain highlights tearing. This issue has been present for me in both GNOME and KDE.

It seems to appear consistently while using Firefox and KDE Plasma 5 desktop, however I have seen it happen in other applications (ex: Ubuntu Settings and Dolphin). It seems only to happen in certain programs: Slack, VS Code, Atom, Gimp, and Google Chrome, have never given me problems.

All the tears seem to be from highlighting something or hovering over a button. Maybe the commonality is something to do with performing a fill?

I'm not the most experienced with Linux so I am thankful for any help.

I believe this person is having the same issue

Examples:

Graphics Info

andrew@qis:~$ glxinfo -B
name of display: :0
display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
    Vendor: Intel Open Source Technology Center (0x8086)
    Device: Mesa DRI Intel(R) HD Graphics 2500 (IVB GT1) (0x152)
    Version: 20.2.6
    Accelerated: yes
    Video memory: 1536MB
    Unified memory: yes
    Preferred profile: core (0x1)
    Max core profile version: 4.2
    Max compat profile version: 3.0
    Max GLES1 profile version: 1.1
    Max GLES[23] profile version: 3.0
OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) HD Graphics 2500 (IVB GT1)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.2 (Core Profile) Mesa 20.2.6
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.20
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile

OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 20.2.6
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30
OpenGL context flags: (none)

OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.0 Mesa 20.2.6
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.00
andrew@qis:~$ lspci | grep VGA 
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200
v2/3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

System Info:

Operating System: Ubuntu 20.04
KDE Plasma Version: 5.18.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.68.0
Qt Version: 5.12.8
Kernel Version: 5.8.0-55-generic
OS Type: 64-bit
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-3470 CPU @ 3.20GHz
Memory: 15.5 GiB of RAM

mesa-utils/focal now 8.4.0-1build1 amd64
qt5-style-kvantum/focal,now 0.20.0+repack-1~focal1 amd64

Compositor Settings (these are the defaults):

• Scale method: Smooth
• Rendering backend: OpenGL 3.1
• Tearing prevention: Automatic When I tried fiddling with these, things started getting weird so I reset them, however I am willing to fiddle more.

If you need any more info just ask. But please someone help me!

Solution 1:

Exact same issue experienced - affected firefox also (unless webrender was set to force disabled). However I was using linux-image-5.8.0-55-generic:amd64. Reverting to kernel initrd.img-5.8.0-48-generic temporarily resolves the issue - but obviously cant stay on a kernel with patched security vulnerabilities.

Switching to (latest) kernel 5.4 permanently resolves the issue - however would like to know if some work is going on to rectify the issues with 5.8?