Probably since switching to Wayland a couple years ago I’ve noticed that all Chrome based browsers start to get laggy when hardware acceleration is enabled. This applies to Chrome, Brave and Vivaldi. My video card as reported by lspci is [AMD/ATI] Navi 23 [Radeon RX 6600/6600 XT/6600M].
By laggy I mean upon entering a tab, it can take up to 3 seconds for any response of the keyboard or mouse by the browser. Load doesn’t have to be high, like one YouTube video, and another browser Window. Or a Google Meet, and another window. Or sometimes just Gmail, and nothing else. This all goes away when I disable hardware acceleration.
I don’t experience anything like this with Firefox even when hardware acceleration is enabled there.
What I’m curious about is if this is perhaps a quirk on my system, or just expected?
Other details include:
Fedora 41
SwayWM, though I’ve tested for this under Gnome and it happens there to
similar terrible experience on Gnome after update to Chrome 134.0.6998.88 (Official Build)
Edit:
Actually the issue was mesa upgrade from version 24.2.4-1.fc41 to 25.0.1-2-fc41.
Reverting to 24.2.4-1.fc41 resolved issue for me.
Kernel in both cases 6.13.6-200.fc41.x86_64, if it matters
I wonder if there is some way to prevent this in future or we need to start printing "It was mesa/*" t-shirts
Your observation is correct and I am very surprised that this has not attracted more attention. What I have noticed is that if you have hardware acceleration enabled any tab, window or PWA in Google Chrome that is streaming any media (Youtube, Spotify etc) will cause micro lags and stuttering in all those tabs, windows PWAs related to google chrome. Even if you have a tab open with a media intense website i.e. imdb.com in the background it will cause lag in google chrome altogether.
Unfortunately have I not found any solution to this problem other then disabling hardware acceleration or using Firefox. Any other web browser that is based upon Chromium appears to have the same problem.
