Display Issue - Horizontal blue lines in application windows

I experienced this issue in both Chrome and Microsoft Teams (blech!). Disabling hardware acceleration appears to have fixed the issue but I would still like to see Apple address this issue as Catalina has seems to have been rushed out to production perhaps a bit too soon..

For the record, I cleared NVRAM or "PRAM" several times in a row yesterday and left my computer on overnight. For the first time in a while there was no message about the computer restarting unexpectedly or any funky lines in my apps that have hardware acceleration in the morning. Seems to be working so far.

How to reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac -> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063

One way I found that does fix the issue, at least temporarily is to force the macbook to sleep (Apple menu -> sleep), and wait for it to totally sleep (external peripherals are off). On wake of the laptop, there is a good chance the issue will be resolved. I found that this is triggered by the macbook sleeping - can cause, or fix the issue.

Resetting PRAM, etc. does not help.

Big Sur Beta 9 dropped the other day. Issue is still present.

I found an easier fix though for those wanting to use acceleration.

Since this occurs with external displays (Radeon GPU in use), simply unplug your external display USB-C to DP or HDMI connector, and once everything jumps over to the main macbook display, you can plug it back in. This almost always resolves the issue until the next time the macbook sleeps.

I reckon all Electron-based application (that use Chromium for rendering) should be reported, to provide a clearer picture of the extent of the glitch and how it's impacting end-users. Not many folks know that Electron is the basis for many standalone web apps out there.

From the Chromium Bug Tracker, which is now closed to comments "for the time being":

Everyone: Apple has indicated that they have created a more reliable set of steps to reproduce this in-house and continue to investigate it.

Current list of software known to have the blue glitches:

1. Safari Version 14.0 (15610.1.28.1.9, 15610) (specifically, WebGL content)
2. Firefox 82.0.2 (64-bit) (specifically, WebGL content)
3. Google Chrome 86.0.4240.111 (Official Build) (x86_64) (specifically, WebGL content)

Electron/Chromium-rendered applications exhibit more 'targeted' glitching, i.e. in specific WebGL windows/views. But they all show similar behaviour. A sure-fire way to see the glitches, when they have been triggered, is to bring up the Developer Tools window (if it is available in the application).

Current list of Electron/Chromium software known to have the blue glitches:

1. Microsoft Visual Studio Code 1.50.1 – main window doesn't glitch, but Developer Tools does
2. Miro 0.4.2 – main window doesn't glitch, but Developer Tools does
3. Spotify 1.1.45.621.gdddebadc – main window doesn't glitch, but speaker selection popup does
4. Brave Browser Version 1.16.72
5. Notion.so Version 2.0.8 (2.0.8)

As I mentioned in my previous comments, interestingly, these two applications listed below seem to be resolved, despite them have past reports of having the glitch. Did the devs figure out a way to work around the hardware acceleration glitch, or simply chose not to rely on h/w acceleration for views that exhibit the glitch?

1. Microsoft Teams 1.3.00.28778
2. Adobe Lightroom Classic 9.3 Build [202005281810-476e492c]

From the Chromium bug tracker (which is now locked):

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1068170#c195

Everyone: Apple has indicated that they have created a more reliable set of steps to reproduce this in-house and continue to investigate it.

Whose court is the ball in now? I do not know.

Perhaps it's just us software devs complaining about this issue. Seems that way. I believe software devs encounter this more often as we are coding, testing and leaving our WebGL views open and running on our browser tabs all the time. The problem is particularly easy to reproduce if you have intensive WebGL operations running (say three.js/babylon.js/pixi.js), let your machine go to sleep and wake it up after an hour (or overnight).

Interestingly, the Google Chrome support page is now rife with end-users claiming the problem was 'worked around' when they disabled H/W acceleration – as I've mentioned multiple times above, not a permanent solution given the drastic reduction in WebGL graphics rendering performance.

Some are even claiming success in resetting NVRAM – or what I call the slap-the-TV-in-case-of-poor-reception fix. No, it doesn't work. Would have been great if it did! I'm wondering why folks would post things like that and call it a day. It is more likely that resetting NVRAM simply forces you to restart the computer, but the problem will eventually come back again.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm not the only one facing a similar situation that is impacting how we work. The Chromium GPU process restarts no longer work reliably for me – I just force a reboot. Incidentally all similar Chromium apps have the "GPU Helper" process that you can also attempt to spam kill but it hasn't worked for me.

I just wish more will step forward to echo these similar issues. Thanks for chiming in.

Hi @haffystyle, not that I know of.

A developer from Figma has posted more technical details to the Chromium bug tracker – linked to SVG rendering in the case of Figma. Glitches are also present in Safari although in my case the artifacts do not go away until a system restart is done:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1068170#c202

It has been almost ten months since the original issue was posted. This matter is still unresolved.

This is the latest update from the Chromium devteam bugtracker:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1068170#c249

Quoted:

Comment 249 by kbr@chromium.org on Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 3:31 AM GMT+10 (6 days ago)

Apple has confirmed that they have a fix in hand and that it's being considered for a forthcoming macOS software update.

Comment 250 by mark@chromium.org on Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 4:24 AM GMT+10 (6 days ago)

Status: ExternalDependency (was: Started)

Per comment 249, ->ExternalDependency, as this is awaiting a fix from Apple.

I believe the ball is squarely in Apple's court although we won't really know for sure due to their silence on this matter.

It has been 6 days since the above was reported (not an official Apple response, just relayed by the Chromium team). Has anyone received any macOS updates recently (Catalina, Big Sur?) that you can test?

Still getting blue glitches. Especially after waking device from sleep. Same story.

Also, echoing brain_'s comment that this is not only impacting Chromium-based software. I did a list of software impacted by this further up in this thread.

As a way to flatly reject Apple's claims that we should direct our issue towards Chromium / Google, the following can be a good series of tests anyone can do when the blue glitches appear:

1. Launch Safari
2. Go to menu Develop > Show JavaScript Console
3. Select the Layers tab
4. Blue glitches will get rendered in the Layers tab

Interestingly, for some content, it appears that Safari can overcome the blue glitches. I've opened up sites such as Canvas (an LMS used by many educational institutions) glitching hard on Chromium but not on Safari. However, the above JavaScript Console > Layers tabs will always trigger the glitch – please try and report here if you can.

On top of that, this webGL demo URL will always trigger the blue glitches for me, on Chrome, Safari AND Firefox:

https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_cloth

So, even if all browsers are historically Chromium-based, it does say a lot about the fact that many applications do rely on the framework. Which could mean more are going to experience a higher recurrence of such incidents. This is only going to get worse in terms of people reporting it, right?

My line of support to Apple tracking this case has stopped replying to me. Has anyone faced this same wall of silence in your support cases?

Yes, disabling hardware acceleration on chrome solves the problem. However it's annoying that I can't use the full power of my Mac.

Search for "GPU rasterization" and ensure that is disabled. This will fix the issue on Chrome

the only thing was the macbook made a lot of fan noise, but after this mds worker thread was done after a minute or two it returned to normal. Everything is the same as before the nvram reset, only no more blue lines :)

This, in combination with also disabling hardware acceleration stopped the crashing from occurring. Thanks for the tip, thought my computer was on the blink, relieved to find out it's a software glitch!

So, ever since the latest update (10.15.5) I haven't had the restart problem. Also, I haven't had the blue lines ever since I did the PRAM reset a few times in a row. I'm thinking it was 2 problems (related or unrelated, who knows?).

1) Blue Lines, solved by PRAM reset

2) Sleep restarts, solved by latest updates

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can anyone else concur?

Same here. The problem(s) seem to be fixed. I also noticed that my secondary monitor doesn't need to be unattached and reattached after it wakes from sleep anymore. I thought it was my cheap monitor cable causing that one, but seems to be fixed now too. :) Thanks Apple! Reseting PRAM was key for the "blue lines".

The closest we can ever get to any sort of response to this issue is linked here, on Mar 17 2021.

So effectively, this has taken almost 1 year after the issues have been initially reported here (and elsewhere).

To paraphrase from the above link, Apple has reproduced the problem and is working with AMD on a fix.

There is no timeline or certainty to this statement and the fix, as this was as described by the Chromium dev team.