Display Issue - Horizontal blue lines in application windows

It's now been over 24 hours with no reappearance of the glitching in Chrome. Note, I did not restart, zap the NVRAM or PRAM, I just did the force-quitting of Renderer, Spare renderer, and GPU Process in the Chrome app Task Manager. I will keep reporting my observations.

See https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/414669/12345 for several workarounds.

If you don't want to restart your browser, try running the following from Terminal.app.

killall "Google Chrome Helper (GPU)"

Yeah, ah, force-quitting Renderer, Spare renderer and GPU Process in the Task Manager just turns out to be the same as turning off hardware acceleration, so not as helpful as I thought it might be... Sorry folks. Thought I was on to something...

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.

Just to add some more information:

MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019

Big Sur 11.2.3 (up to date)

RAM 64GB

CPU 2.4 GHz Intel i9

Graphics AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB

And I have been having the problem with more than one software, not only with Google Chrome (for instance, today it has happened with WhatsApp own app).

@Chuank : This is the best summary I have seen so far. I too am stuck in a hard place working with WebGL every day. Apple needs to address this issue because I feel like I bought a high end MBP that is useless and I wasted my money with Apple.

I've had this issue for over a year in my 2019 16" MBP Radeon 5500 8 GB. Had it evaluated a year ago at the Apple Genius Bar. The diagnostics came back clean. They still replaced the top case assembly, but the issue did not go away. It went away disabling the graphics acceleration. For a while.

Fast forward a year. The issue returned in Adobe Camera Raw, and began outright crashing the computer with the familiar fan speed-up sound. It eventually went into a reboot cycle from which I could not extract it. Back to the genius bar. This time it failed the onboard memory test, and Apple replaced the logic board. I got it back today. New logic board, that is new GPU, new memory, new everything... and the issue is still there in Chrome. Brilliant.

FWIW, they replaced my mainboard requiring me to then rebuild my system from a backup, when I reported it to the local Genius bar, and the issue remained. That said (and I'm knocking on as much wood as I can find around me now) at some random time after that, it just stopped. I'm still using the same setup, settings, outboard adaptors and dongles, monitors, etc, and it hasn't happened in weeks. I don't know what's more frustrating, that it happened at all, or that I don't know what I did to make it go away...

So we've had two reported cases here thus far, where a logic board replacement did not resolve the issue. This is interesting and helpful to know, thanks for sharing it here.

@ileradeltercomondo zapping NVRAM is not a long-term fix (but please let us know if it did with the new logic board!). All it does is force you to trigger a restart of your computer. As we have previously established, restarting the computer resets the graphics card sufficiently to the point where it will resume normal operation. However, this "good to go" state may not last (and neither am I trying to jinx you), especially when you have WebGL content rendered to screen (see list of apps in previous posts as a starting point), and especially when your display goes to sleep with said content rendering on-screen.

Recently I've also had the glitches appear right when I switch app tasks to one that uses WebGL. This is beyond bad. The most infuriating aspect of this issue is that it has almost been one year without official acknowledgement from Apple.

Zapping the NVRam gets me working again, but only temporarily, and that's with the new logic board. Changing the logic board did not resolve the issue in my case. What did jinx me was posting above that it miraculously fixed itself after a while. A day after I posted that, the glitching returned just to rub my nose in it.

What I did find was that it seemed to have something to do with switching between battery operation and AC adaptor operation, and potentially with going from one display set up, say, like at home with my 27" and 24" monitors, and my office configuration, which is a 20" 1920x1080 monitor. I can pretty much guarantee that it will happen once I get back to my main configuration in my home office with the two monitors. However, if I do the reset, I can work with that configuration for weeks and not see the problem occurring.

I have automatic graphics switching disabled on the advice of another person with this problem who reported it lowered the occurrence of the problem.

Three reported cases now... I've just had my new (<1 month old..) 16 inch returned after a new battery and logic board replacement (it wouldn't turn on before I sent it off) and 2 days in I'm getting the horizontal lines back. It was running Big Sur before I sent it off, still had the issues, although I had green horizontal lines on Big Sur and blue horizontal lines on 10.15.7.

I've got a MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019

64GB RAM

CPU 2.3 GHz Intel i9

Graphics AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB

So so annoying!

Clearly, there's an issue with the GPU in the MacBook Pro 16" 2019 and software that uses the Chromium devkit that causes this to occur. Apple's acknowledged it in another forum post that I can't find now, but they said that they were talking to the Chromium team at Google about it, but something tells me that nothing is going to be done about it.

I find this a disappointing response from both Google and Apple. It might be worthy of a class action lawsuit? This might be the only way we can get compensation and recompense for the lack of action in remedying the problem...

Thoughts?

ileradeltercomondo wrote:

I find this a disappointing response from both Google and Apple.

It's also happening for apps that are not using/depending on Chromium devkit. So I think Apple is the only one to blame here.

ileradeltercomondo, I agree. Maybe a class action lawsuit would get their attention. I paid thousands for this thing and I have to reboot it like a wintel box every day. Its a waste of time and energy.

You shouldn't reset NVRAM/PRAM unless you need to. This issue exists because of a problem with MBP and MacOS internals. There is a beta upcoming from Apple that purports to fix this as it exists mostly with hardware/GPU accelerated software displays. Resetting NVRAM will be a temporary fix and could lead to your calibration settings being incorrectly set. The best method to mitigate this is to turn off any hardware acceleration if your application has a setting for that (sometimes it is a command line argument). For example in Chrome, where this problem also exists for newer MBP, you can disable hardware acceleration or rasterization computation.