Community-edition: Bad rendering when disabling Hardware Acceleration

[joaomlneto]

Due to issue #538 I've resorted to disabling hardware acceleration in Rambox.

However, some of the services, some of the time, will not render correctly. This may include flickering, or even incomplete renders.

The one that is easiest for me to reproduce is enlarging an image on a WhatsApp chat.

Services that see some weird behavior

• Rocket Chat (messages flicker)
• WhatsApp (enlarging an image in a chat causes flickering and incomplete/unstable rendering; scrolling in a chat causes flicker)

Services that seem to work OK

• Gitter
• Hangouts
• Messenger
• Telegram

Steps to reproduce

1. Open an WhatsApp conversation that has an image in the chat
2. Click the image to enlarge it -- it will render badly -- with flickers, and incomplete rendering.
   

   Example

Without hardware acceleration

With hardware acceleration

ENVIRONMENT

Macbook Pro (Mid 2015) with Discrete Graphics
Rambox: v0.5.3
OS: macOS 10.12.3
Arch: x64

[ideologysec]

Related, but not quite the same thing - would be very helpful to have an option to not use the dedicated card for hardware acceleration on MacBook Pros. (or even just use the integrated card period). Having Rambox use the dedicated GPU kills battery life.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[joaomlneto]

Issue is still valid.

[saenzramiro]

Guys... after investigating this seems like Electron's team is aware of this:

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/13303
https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/9842

Is related to GPU consumption and hardware acceleration also. For now, flickering screens (like your pics) can be prevented by enabling Hardware Acceleration (see Rambox Preferences) but this will use the discrete graphics card and it will drain the battery.

The ideal case is to have Hardware Acceleration enabled and use the integrated graphics card, but now there is no way to accomplish this.

Any other ideas?

[joaomlneto]

If it's an upstream bug, then I think this can be closed.

It would be nice if there is a semi-automatic workaround in the meantime, since it has remained unpatched for so long and there's no ETA.

[lock[bot]]

This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.