Youtube, Discord, Visual Studio Code are flickering with black checkered squares/vertical lines. Partial solutions to this issue.

[KsushaTeaKisa]

The issue exists between Windows and the chromium core.

However, this bug only occurs with Nvidia GPUs starting from 9xx.
I don't deny that this issue is related to Windows, because I started talking about it myself, but don't forget the fact that this bug exists only on Nvidia GPUs.

Try altering yoru brightness/contrast settings
I've had this on low quality displays recently, even 60Hz ones


It only showed up with specific content on screen, like I'd open up a new tab or click some expanding item (Or inventory or menus in games) and i could go in/out and test different monitor settings til i got rid of it

I really don't know what you're talking about. How can changing the brightness and contrast help to fix this bug?

 

[Sora]

However, this bug only occurs with Nvidia GPUs starting from 9xx.

This bug only affects devices that have MPO enabled, and AMD radeons are not immune, it was also introduced explicitly with a change in chromium going back to 2021.

Edit-
And Intel IGP's,

 

[KsushaTeaKisa]

This bug only affects devices that have MPO enabled, and AMD radeons are not immune, it was also introduced explicitly with a change in chromium going back to 2021.

Edit-
And Intel IGP's,

Looks like a completely different issue.


Moreover, I have already said before that disabling MPO in Windows does not help to solve this bug.
I haven't seen a single AMD user yet who reported exactly the same bug. All users affected by this have an Nvidia GPUs.

This bug (which is in the current topic, and not what you showed) has existed since 2020, but it appeared massively after the fall of last year. Even here, when people first encountered this bug, they only have Nvidia GPUs.

 

[TissueBox]

Thank you for this thread, your research into the issue, and compiling your findings. I haven't been able to find a lot of information on this checker box problem before stumbling upon it in "New Forum Post" here. I first thought it was artifacting (so a GPU memory failing issue) but my second thought was that those tend to lead to hard freezes rather than disappearing in roughly a second or two.

I upgraded platforms from a 3950x/3080 on Windows 10 22h2 using Wallpaper Engine with no issues, to a 13900k/4080 on Windows 11 22h2 and that's when the black checker boxes started appearing on videos. It isn't a deal breaker, but jarring when it happens and it does happen more often than I'd like.

I had read that some people had luck with changing ANGLE to D3D11/D3D11on12 but it didn't work for me; I'll try OpenGL next as per your original post. I can't recall having seen it on Discord or anywhere else, but I'll update this post if I do.

 

[Sora]

Looks like a completely different issue.

its not.

Moreover, I have already said before that disabling MPO in Windows does not help to solve this bug.

And i don't believe you, because its known that it does - and the issue only manifests on MPO supporting hardware, it does not replicate on desktop Pascal where MPO's is not supported.

 

[moist_wethole]

Thank you for being active on this issue, I tried my best with Asus support but they use AI to reply back and it's a useless rigmarole of sending me their GPU driver, which has made the artifacting worse. I RMAd my ASUS GPU Mini v2 OC RTX3060TI and got an ASUS Dual with updated memory GDDR6X and have the issues even worse. I have a AMD RX480 4GB that has no issues like this.
I tested a game called Black Mesa and when it's in 1080P the artifacts happen in the intro

Nvidia: rtx 3060 ti - YouTube
AMD: (9) rx480 - YouTube

Or do I just keep RMAing my GPUs every 3 years? My warranty expires in 2026 maybe I should just return my card a year before the W expires and hope that they are out of stock of these 30 series cards?
Or if there are GPU drivers that go back and work?

 

[KsushaTeaKisa]

Thank you for being active on this issue, I tried my best with Asus support but they use AI to reply back and it's a useless rigmarole of sending me their GPU driver, which has made the artifacting worse. I RMAd my ASUS GPU Mini v2 OC RTX3060TI and got an ASUS Dual with updated memory GDDR6X and have the issues even worse. I have a AMD RX480 4GB that has no issues like this.
I tested a game called Black Mesa and when it's in 1080P the artifacts happen in the intro

Nvidia: rtx 3060 ti - YouTube
AMD: (9) rx480 - YouTube

Or do I just keep RMAing my GPUs every 3 years? My warranty expires in 2026 maybe I should just return my card a year before the W expires and hope that they are out of stock of these 30 series cards?
Or if there are GPU drivers that go back and work?

Hello, I have a similar situation if I have the Nvidia overlay enabled. Try turning it off (and the Discord overlay too, if it's on) and maybe it will help you as it did me.
Since this is not a hardware problem, I would not do a RMA if I were you.

 

[moist_wethole]

Hello, I have a similar situation if I have the Nvidia overlay enabled. Try turning it off (and the Discord overlay too, if it's on) and maybe it will help you as it did me.
Since this is not a hardware problem, I would not do a RMA if I were you.

Well I did turn that off, and it's still doing the same thing as before. (as seen on the video, but the overlay is not there anymore as I just disabled it) But this is just a game, I'm also experiencing the same issue as you guys with chromium based apps.

 

[Mussels]

I really don't know what you're talking about. How can changing the brightness and contrast help to fix this bug?

sometimes its actually a monitor issue

 

[moist_wethole]

Tried the Studio drivers, no luck. This issue is getting worse day by day not sure how. Chromium based apps are experiencing more and more frequent artifacts.

Did nvidia acknowledge this issue on their forums? This needs an active forum post on their forums. Again, games do not have this issue, for example CS:GO, CyberPunk and whatever and so on.
Will definitely try to sell this garbage and go back to the ol' coil whine induced AMD.

Also, shouldn't've other GPUs from Nvidia get this same issue if it's the driver issues? Only seeing this issue on 30 series cards.

Tried the Studio drivers, no luck. This issue is getting worse day by day not sure how. Chromium based apps are experiencing more and more frequent artifacts.

Did nvidia acknowledge this issue on their forums? This needs an active forum post on their forums. Again, games do not have this issue, for example CS:GO, CyberPunk and whatever and so on.
Will definitely try to sell this garbage and go back to the ol' coil whine induced AMD.

Also, shouldn't've other GPUs from Nvidia get this same issue if it's the driver issues? Only seeing this issue on 30 series cards.

Update:
The game I was testing was flawed and "-oldgameui" fixed it *black mesa.

So far on the studio drivers I did not have any youtube artifacts(ambient mode causes most of these issues) and I have it set to use OpenGL (Edge).

Steam also did not give me any artifacts.

Potentially running a cleanup of all drivers and installing Studio drivers cleanly may be something.

 

[Mussels]

I wonder why you're seeing it and i'm not, i've got two 30 series systems here and neither has these issues.
It's chromium based, i use edge problem free - is edge immune to the problem?

I think i've seen this flicker a few times in baldurs gate 3 in vulkan with the discord overlay, but being a primarily single player game i don't use that often.
Makes me wonder if its a third party overlay screwing up?

Mine looks the size of the discord overlay but in the wrong position on-screen, like the games adjusted for my 150% DPI scaling but the glitching brief window isn't aware and appears near the bottom right, not the top left.


Coil whine can be reduced/removed entirely, we have threads dedicated to that.
(Superglue on inductors, ferrite beads, altering voltages with under/over clocking, replacing PSU to a different design)

 

[moist_wethole]

I wonder why you're seeing it and i'm not, i've got two 30 series systems here and neither has these issues.
It's chromium based, i use edge problem free - is edge immune to the problem?

I think i've seen this flicker a few times in baldurs gate 3 in vulkan with the discord overlay, but being a primarily single player game i don't use that often.
Makes me wonder if its a third party overlay screwing up?

Mine looks the size of the discord overlay but in the wrong position on-screen, like the games adjusted for my 150% DPI scaling but the glitching brief window isn't aware and appears near the bottom right, not the top left.


Coil whine can be reduced/removed entirely, we have threads dedicated to that.
(Superglue on inductors, ferrite beads, altering voltages with under/over clocking, replacing PSU to a different design)

I'm not sure this is my second RTX 3060Ti only difference is that this new one is with GDDR6X.
I'm seeing this issue on youtube using edge or brave browser (did not test other browsers).
Games run normally, no artifacts there as I've tested GTA 5, CS:GO, CS2, CS:S, CS1.6, Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, ... .
I have discord turned off most of the time, nvidia overlay when disabled the same issues occur. Nothing installed besides that.
I have this issue with Display port as well as HDMI.
Which RTX cards do you have? Maybe this is an issue with poor people RTX 30 series cards.
Both of mine were from ASUS and both are RTX 3060ti's, and again, no issues on my RX480 AMD card, tested everything on Win 10 and 11 and re-installed everything 2-3 times.

 

[Mussels]

I'm not sure this is my second RTX 3060Ti only difference is that this new one is with GDDR6X.
I'm seeing this issue on youtube using edge or brave browser (did not test other browsers).
Games run normally, no artifacts there as I've tested GTA 5, CS:GO, CS2, CS:S, CS1.6, Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, ... .
I have discord turned off most of the time, nvidia overlay when disabled the same issues occur. Nothing installed besides that.
I have this issue with Display port as well as HDMI.
Which RTX cards do you have? Maybe this is an issue with poor people RTX 30 series cards.
Both of mine were from ASUS and both are RTX 3060ti's, and again, no issues on my RX480 AMD card, tested everything on Win 10 and 11 and re-installed everything 2-3 times.

3070 and 3090

There are people with issues with office in another thread, and when i mention overlays there are far more than people realise.

Discord, steam, windows itself (volume bar etc), xbox overlay, afterburner, etc etc. They're everywhere these days, and it's why MPO is important - yet people disable it knowingly or unintentionally all the time

 

[mattsrs]

hey guys, just signed up to say I saw this issue with my 4090 that I just bought. Was concerned that its the GPU hardware and was going to return but looks like its widespread and is driver related. Here's my post on Reddit with a short video of the issue. Here's the recording direct link: https://youtube.com/shorts/CkLSddIx5k0?si=pLGv3mpg4qiko1yX

 

[KsushaTeaKisa]

hey guys, just signed up to say I saw this issue with my 4090 that I just bought. Was concerned that its the GPU hardware and was going to return but looks like its widespread and is driver related. Here's my post on Reddit with a short video of the issue. Here's the recording direct link: https://youtube.com/shorts/CkLSddIx5k0?si=pLGv3mpg4qiko1yX

This is not related to drivers because even older versions do not solve this, however yes, this is not the fault of your GPU and this issue is known to Nvidia, don't worry. Use OpenGL API in your chromium browser as a temporary solution to this bug.

 

[mattsrs]

This is not related to drivers because even older versions do not solve this, however yes, this is not the fault of your GPU and this issue is known to Nvidia, don't worry. Use OpenGL API in your chromium browser as a temporary solution to this bug.

View attachment 311774

Thanks! Where was this Nvidia comment posted?

 

[KsushaTeaKisa]

Thanks! Where was this Nvidia comment posted?

It was here

 

[Mussels]

This is not related to drivers because even older versions do not solve this, however yes, this is not the fault of your GPU and this issue is known to Nvidia, don't worry. Use OpenGL API in your chromium browser as a temporary solution to this bug.

View attachment 311774

Heck if Manuels aware of it, then they're working on it.
Since office has bugs as well, it does lean towards a windows/WDM issue


MS do have some fixes on the way for multimonitor that sound like they make some big changes
Windows 11 to get graphics improvements for high-refresh-rate displays - Neowin

It enables Windows 11 to adjust the refresh rate for the specific content on each monitor. For example, you can have a higher value on a monitor with your game and a lower value on the other display with a video or static picture. This will also come in handy for those connecting their gaming laptops to external displays.

This doesn't sound right, since we can already do this.

The MS blog on it
Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25915 | Windows Insider Blog

[Graphics]​

• We have improved refresh rate logic to allow different refresh rates on different monitors, depending on the refresh rate for each monitor and content shown on the screen. This will help most with refresh rate-dependent multitasking, like playing a game and watching a video at the same time.
• While a Dynamic Refresh Rate (DRR) is selected and Battery saver is also enabled, Windows will remain at the lower refresh rate and not switch to the higher rate until after Battery saver is disabled.

I think this is meant to be for use with MPO so each plane can have mixed frame rate items composited together in WDM better, avoiding these flickers. With MPO disabled and VRR, everything drops to the lowest frame rate item - so things like the windows volume bar appearing over the top tanks the refresh rate down until it's gone, or disables VRR entirely

What seems related is what they discuss with a video playing setting one frame rate, and a mis-match with another - 60FPS video wants to run your browser/office at 60Hz, but at 144 it's not a clean math division so you get a few frames of mis-matched video

Even on seperate displays, i can see something like that being related to the issues people are having

(The planes work like the multiple desktop feature or even multi monitor itself - windows renders things "off screen" and then meshes them together in a specific order - and when frame rates aren't equal divisions of each other, things go bad)

 

[moist_wethole]

Things are pointing to Windows, as Windows 11 started to make these issues even worse for me. I update every time and the issue has gotten worse, the dynamic refresh rate thing is sus to me. Good thing we have a reply from Manuel. Hope the 50% premium we pay for Nvidia is for something

 

[Mussels]

Things are pointing to Windows, as Windows 11 started to make these issues even worse for me. I update every time and the issue has gotten worse, the dynamic refresh rate thing is sus to me. Good thing we have a reply from Manuel. Hope the 50% premium we pay for Nvidia is for something

Dynamic refresh is a new feature coming primarily for laptops, so that windows itself is VRR Aware - so on a 60-120Hz display it can drop to 60Hz, without needing a fullscreen exclusive application to do it.

Thats meant to save battery power on laptops, but on desktops should stop GPU's clocking to full speed at idle with high refresh rate displays - especially multi monitor setups where they can all 'idle' to 60 together

 

[cook1e0]

Seriously, thank you so much for this write up. I've been having this issue rarely starting around the time you made this post, and it was always remedied with a system restart. I was worrying that the VRAM on my 3090 FE was slowly giving up, but a relief to hear that it's a software issue.

 

[Wezelkrozum]

For anyone who is looking for a workaround with less performance impact than switching the Google Chrome ANGLE flag from D3D11 (Directx 11) to OpenGL.

Create a Google Chrome shortcut and add the flag --disable-direct-composition-video-overlays in the "Target" field:

Why does this flag help? Because this is a bug in the direct video composition overlays feature that Chromium uses to render videos on NVidia cards.
For more info: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1155285#c44

 

[KsushaTeaKisa]

Seriously, thank you so much for this write up. I've been having this issue rarely starting around the time you made this post, and it was always remedied with a system restart. I was worrying that the VRAM on my 3090 FE was slowly giving up, but a relief to hear that it's a software issue.

I understand your feelings. I experienced stress last fall because of this bug
I'm glad you're okay now. Looking forward to the fix together!

For anyone who is looking for a workaround with less performance impact than switching the Google Chrome ANGLE flag from D3D11 (Directx 11) to OpenGL.

Create a Google Chrome shortcut and add the flag --disable-direct-composition-video-overlays in the "Target" field:

View attachment 312553

Why does this flag help? Because this is a bug in the direct video composition overlays feature that Chromium uses to render videos on NVidia cards.
For more info: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1155285#c44

Hello again! Thanks for explaining the reason for this bug. Nvidia still hasn't found the root of this bug, could you write to them about it? I think driver feedback form / Manuel's mail would be perfect for this. I will also try to tell them about these details.

P.S As far as I know this feature is being developed by Microsoft.


P.S.S I sent them a form with this information and wrote them a comment in the last driver's feedback.

 

[Wezelkrozum]

Hello again! Thanks for explaining the reason for this bug. Nvidia still hasn't found the root of this bug, could you write to them about it? I think driver feedback form / Manuel's mail would be perfect for this. I will also try to tell them about these details.

I'm currently trying to link the techpowerup forum thread, reddit threads, chromium issues and nvidia forum threads together via several links.
I think that both NVidia and Chromium are at the moment aware of this issue. But I doubt that they know how to fix it.

I'll send a direct message to Manuel on the NVidia forum with the links to all the threads.

 

[Mussels]

For anyone who is looking for a workaround with less performance impact than switching the Google Chrome ANGLE flag from D3D11 (Directx 11) to OpenGL.

Create a Google Chrome shortcut and add the flag --disable-direct-composition-video-overlays in the "Target" field:

View attachment 312553

Why does this flag help? Because this is a bug in the direct video composition overlays feature that Chromium uses to render videos on NVidia cards.
For more info: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1155285#c44

That ties in to MPO, so it does seem related to the overlay layers after all

Something is presenting over the top of the video, whatever it may be