Chromium based apps occasionally shatter (render blue noise) on MacOS Catalina

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Chromium based apps occasionally shatter (render blue noise) on MacOS Catalina

I have a MacBook Pro 16" running MacOS Catalina 10.15.4 (19E266) and this is what occasionally happens to me. Sometimes, seemingly after the laptop wakes up from sleep, all Chromium applications (Chrome, Electron, ...) start having this ugly blue noise - surprisingly at the same time (not just one).

On the other hand it does not seem to be WebKit in general, since Safari is not affected by that.

Is it a known issue? Closing and reopening the Chrome does not help. I need to restart the computer.

MacBook Pro 16", macOS 10.15

Posted on Apr 6, 2020 3:48 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

vojtechfrompardubice Author

Level 1

5 points

May 8, 2020 9:22 AM in response to laurence2020

What I found is that switching a GPU removes is a temporary workaround. (In my case) It can be done by

unplugging the powersupply & external monitor
steveschow-gfxcardstatus app from brew - beware, accoring to the original author this approach might be too aggressive

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Answer 2

dialabrain

Level 10

126,695 points

Apr 6, 2020 4:31 AM in response to vojtechfrompardubice

FWIW, I don't have Electron installed but I have a number of Macs with Chromium-based browsers installed and haven't seen the problem. I've also never read of anyone else having the issue.

One caveat, I never put my Macs to sleep, only the displays.

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Answer 3

Apr 8, 2020 12:58 AM in response to vojtechfrompardubice

I have exactly the same issue, running on MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019, Catalina 10.15.4), chrome tends to shatter on some specific pages (Jira/Youtube/GoogleDocs). Only computer restart works for me but it comes back after a while.

Safari seem to operate fine.

In addition to that, computer sometimes crashes.

I hope there will be a fix from Apple soon, it started after the last update for me.

*Same issue was reported on Google Support.

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Answer 4

m_o

Level 1

4 points

May 12, 2020 5:18 AM in response to vojtechfrompardubice

Same issue here on my MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019), AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 4 GB & Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB. Both in 10.15.3 and now 10.15.4 (19E287) and only in Chromium-based browsers like Chrome and MS Edge. Safari and Firefox are not affected.

Switching to the integrated Intel graphics with gfxCardStatus (https://gfx.io/) solves it for the time being. As does closing all GPU-intensive applications like Photoshop, Illustrator etc. so that the Mac also switches back to the integrated GPU.

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Answer 5

Apr 22, 2020 8:03 AM in response to vojtechfrompardubice

I have the same issue on Catalina 10.15.4 (is when it started for me) but in the console as well and only on some websites/pages. I found that Brave seems to function fine.

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Answer 6

Apr 13, 2020 11:33 AM in response to vojtechfrompardubice

Same issue here. MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019). Cataline 10.15.4 (19E287). Chrome

Version 81.0.4044.92 (Officiel version) (64-bit)

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Chromium based apps occasionally shatter (render blue noise) on MacOS Catalina

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