Wierd flickering when watching videos with gsync enabled
-
Hi, I have wierd flickering when watching twitch or youtube videos and as I read in the forums this often occurs with a gsync monitors.
Disbling hardware acceleration can't be the solution. It is a workaround at best as vivaldi is the only browser with that problem. This flickering problem exists for years now and always the same answer is disable hardware acceleration, disable some wierd 2d canvas flags or create a profile for vivaldi to not use gsync(which is a horrible solution to give because then after every tab-switch the screen goes black for a second because it switches from gsync to not gsync)
Back in the DirectX 11 days you could switch gsync to only be used with exclusive fullscreen programs. Now every game has just borderless windows and you have to set gsync to be enabled in windowed and fullscreen mode.
Has no one ever reported this as a bug?
-
@Phobos Hi - GPU-related video issues are probably the hardest of all to troubleshoot, and since Vivaldi is basically just a UI on top of Chromium, there's very little Vivaldi devs can do about it.
That's why the general advice is to try turning off HWA - even though as you say, it's just a workaround. At the least it can show that the issue is with HWA and not something else, so it's a start.
The big mistake a lot of users do is adding the browser EXE to their GPU control panel - this will cause a lot of issues and should not be done. The browser is just fine without having specific GPU settings applied to it.
I have a 144hz GSync monitor, actually running at 120hz with GSync enabled, and I never have any of the issues you describe with YT. I don't use Twich much. I was running a GTX970 since 2015, ran like a charm. Recently I upgraded to a RTX3070, and I was worried I would see the same issues others have reported with newer GPUs, but so far nothing at all, it just works fine with Vivaldi.
Has no one ever reported this as a bug?
No idea. I think the best advice I can give is to go through all the troubleshooting steps, test in a clean profile and reproduce the issue. Then report a bug with as much information about your system as possible.
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/troubleshoot/troubleshooting-issues/
https://vivaldi.com/bugreport/Like I said, because Vivaldi is based off Chromium, most if not all GPU issues are from upstream/Chromium bugs, but maybe related to the specific version Vivaldi builds on. So another advice is to disable HWA for a while, wait for a new version and try to enable it again, see if the problem is gone.
🎻Volunteer helper · Forum moderator · Sopranos tester 🛠️Troubleshooting 🐛Report a bug 📜Markdown help
🦆"With a rubber duck, one's never alone" -Douglas Adams🦆 -
@Pathduck Thanks for the in-depth answer and I understand your point of view. I work in the IT industry as a software developer myself and I know how difficult it is to analyse these bugs.
As I said, it's only a problem with vivaldi and not with other Chromium-based browsers. I know that vivaldi is just a user interface for Chromium, but that doesn't change the fact that users with this problem will choose another browser. I keep coming back to vivaldi after testing other browsers and disliking them. I then used Firefox for about a year, went back to vivaldi and still have this flickering, mostly if not only on Twitch.
So now I've created a brand new profile ( deleted the user data folder completely). The first thing I did after clicking through the wizard with all the features activated was to go to twitch.tv and log in.
So I selected a streamer and immediately had the flickering in the browser again.
However, the problem is not always reproducible, because if you change the tab and then switch back to the twitch tab, the problem might not occur again.
If I disable hardware acceleration, the problem disappears, but then there are numerous dropped frames every second. So it's a kind of unreasonable workaround.
So yes, unfortunately I have no choice but to hope that the problem will be fixed in some later version, because I have no idea how to make a useful bug report out of this.
-
@Phobos said in Wierd flickering when watching videos with gsync enabled:
I know how difficult it is to analyse these bugs.
I can't do any analysing - I don't work at Vivaldi, just a volunteer helper
That's why issues need to be reported to the tracker to be looked at, if it can be confirmed at all that is.
All I can do is offer advice on how you could try troubleshooting on your system.Are you sure you've remove the browser from any GPU-related control panel settings? Just remove it, don't set as global, remove it.
Are you able to make a screen recording of this flickering?
If the theory is GSync is to blame, try disabling GSync for the monitor.
And make sure your GPU drivers are updated of course.
As well as making sure there's no other 3rd-party software running that could interfere. -
This post is deleted!
