Lots of flickering under Wayland on Nvidia

[ralmond]

System Details

• OS: Pop_OS 22.04, Gnome 42.9, Nvidia drivers 545.29.02
• Thorium Version 117.0.5938.157

Problem
I am experiencing a lot of flickering (often windows behind the browser momentarily popping up over the browser window). This especially happens when watching videos on YouTube, although it occassionally happens elsewhere, particularly when popping up dialogs (e.g., saving a file). Also, dropdown menus initially appear blank, but if I move the mouse down over them, the menu text appears.

These issues are not occurring with Chromium 119.0.6045.159,

Additional Notes
The problem seems to have gotten noticeably worse since upgrading my nvidia drivers to 29.02. This may be a weird interaction between Thorium, Wayland/Gnome and the Nvidia driver.

[sleeplessKomodo]

System:
  Host: nobara Kernel: 6.5.9-201.fsync.fc38.x86_64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64
    compiler: gcc v: 2.39-15.fc38 Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 5.27.9 tk: Qt
    v: 5.15.11 wm: kwin_wayland dm: SDDM Distro: Nobara release 38 (Thirty
    Eight) base: RHEL 38
    Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA TU104 [GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER] vendor: eVga.com.
    driver: nvidia v: 535.113.01 arch: Turing pcie: speed: 8 GT/s lanes: 16
    ports: active: none off: DP-2,HDMI-A-1 empty: DP-1,DP-3,Unknown-1
    bus-ID: 08:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:1e81

Similar issues on Fedora (Nobara) 38. I see similar issues with the Microsoft Edge browser for linux, but likewise, the browsers are functional.

[kbirin]

I'm no expert, but this issue reminds me of a problem with the chromium engine. Have you try to enable Wayland support in chrome://flags on the browser ?

Steps

1. Open a new tab in your browser
2. Enter chrome://flags
3. In the search bar type wayland
4. Enable WebRTC PipeWire support and Preferred Ozone platform if they aren't.
5. Restart your browser

[sternskr]

This may not just be a linux issue, it might be something with nvidia itself. I've had a similar issue for a while now where everything flickers. I'm on Win 11, and just resorted to running thorium via AMD iGPU

[sternskr]

I am unsure what the NVidia control panel has for options on linux, but on windows following the suggestion mentioned in this AVX2 build issue worked to fix it on Win11 Alex313031/Thorium-Win-AVX2#112

I suspect MFAA being enabled might be the cause as I had everything else they suggested already set

[emmanueloctavi0]

I'm no expert, but this issue reminds me of a problem with the chromium engine. Have you try to enable Wayland support in chrome://flags on the browser ?

Steps

1. Open a new tab in your browser

2. Enter **chrome://flags**

3. In the search bar type **wayland**

4. **Enable** WebRTC PipeWire support and Preferred Ozone platform if they aren't.

5. Restart your browser

Yes, this worked for me

[mirao]

I have the same issue in Google Chrome. E.g. in GMail, a page content is flickering when I'm scrolling. Also when I'm switching between browser tabs, very often the tab where I'm switching + its content isn't refreshed until I move mouse.
The issue doesn't happen in X11.
And never had such issue in Wayland with Ryzen (AMD) graphics.

A change from "Default" to "Auto" in the Chrome option "Preferred Ozone platform" helped me. Thanks @Thoutmose

My OS is Ubuntu 24.04 and graphics MSI RTX 4060 (nVidia), driver 550.107.02

[luochen1990]

I'm no expert, but this issue reminds me of a problem with the chromium engine. Have you try to enable Wayland support in chrome://flags on the browser ?

Steps

1. Open a new tab in your browser
2. Enter chrome://flags
3. In the search bar type wayland
4. Enable WebRTC PipeWire support and Preferred Ozone platform if they aren't.
5. Restart your browser

Is there some similar thing for Microsoft Edge ?

[mirao]

I have the same issue in Google Chrome. E.g. in GMail, a page content is flickering when I'm scrolling. Also when I'm switching between browser tabs, very often the tab where I'm switching + its content isn't refreshed until I move mouse.

I upgraded nVidia driver to the latest beta 560.35.03 and the issue has gone. So now it's working even without changing of the flags in Chrome.