Text fragmentation and flicker

[mahalde]

Description

Whenever I open the browser, strange text fragmentation can be seen. It sometimes happens when I open the site, sometimes only after I interact with it. This isn't contained to website, also Brave intern sites like the settings or the DevTools are affected. Also on scrolling the text flickers into different fragmentations.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open Brave Browser
2. Watch any site and interact with it
3. Wait and eventually the screen errors show up

Actual result:

Brave rewards looks like this:

The settings look like this:

Expected result:

The text should show up normally.

Reproduces how often:

Easily reproduced whenever I watch anything in the Brave Browser.

Brave version (brave://version info)

Name	Value
Brave	0.58.21 Chromium: 71.0.3578.98 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Revision	15234034d19b85dcd9a03b164ae89d04145d8368-refs/branch-heads/3578@{#897}
OS	Windows

Reproducible on current release:

• Does it reproduce on brave-browser dev/beta builds?
  It reproduces on beta builds.

Website problems only:

• Does the issue resolve itself when disabling Brave Shields?
  • No.
• Is the issue reproducible on the latest version of Chrome?
  • No.

Additional Information

None

[srirambv]

Does disabling hardware acceleration solve this?

[mahalde]

Yes it does! The fragmentation and flickering are gone as far as I can see. 😄

[srirambv]

Would be a good idea to check for driver updates on your machine.

[GeetaSarvadnya]

I have seen this issue on Windows 10 x64 once, after driver updates issue got resolved automatically.

[ghost]

i had this issue at one point but it stopped happening after a little while. it is for sure a driver or hardware acceleration issue but i never experienced such an issue with google chrome.

[rebron]

@onlyflix Would you be able to copy and send over the info you have in brave://gpu in the broken state so we can diagnose?

[mahalde]

Of course, here it is.

[iefremov]

@onlyflix Hi, can you please also share chrome://gpu info taken from Chrome on your machine?

[bsclifton]

@iefremov it should be shared above:
https://gist.github.com/onlyflix/09048e7f8d3726ecff834e06ac96083a

(copy/paste looks like it lost some of the formatting)

Is there anything in particular you're wanting to see?

[iefremov]

@bsclifton I assume that what is shared is the brave://gpu from Brave.
My idea is to compare this page snapshotted on Chrome versus Brave brave://gpu to check any differences.

[bsclifton]

@iefremov ah - gotcha 😄 my bad! Would be great to compare

[mahalde]

This is the Chrome GPU log.

[iefremov]

Thanks @onlyflix
Comparing two logs I can see that Brave uses discrete GPU, while Chrome stays on the on-chip one. Need to investigate why it happens and whats wrong with the discrete chip.

[GeetaSarvadnya]

1+ https://community.brave.com/t/distorted-web-content/51009

[iefremov]

Filed an issue discussed on Twitter: #3969

[iefremov]

One more similar issue #3471

In this one disabling the HW acceleration helps, and @kjozwiak reproduced the problem in Chrome on his VM.

[GeetaSarvadnya]

1+ https://community.brave.com/t/text-in-webpage-broken-or-hidden/65396/2

[bsclifton]

Closing as duplicate of #3471