Chromium Display Bug - MacOS - Blue Green Lines - Screen Display Corruption

There is a known bug in the Chromium engine that affects all Electron apps, of which Obsidian is one. It causes blue and green distortions on all windows. This is due to a GPU rendering issue for some recent MacBook Pros.

Here is a screenshot
See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1068170 for full details.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Change display modes, or wake the Mac from sleep.
  2. See distortions.

Environment

  • Operating system: MacOS 15.7
  • Obsidian version: 0.9.11

Additional information

There are only two effective work-arounds:

  1. Go to System Preferences > Energy Saver and restart the Mac. This prevents future occurrences but limits your ability to use the GPU for other applications.

  2. Open up Activity Monitor, and view the CPU tab. Filter for the process 'Obsidian GPU" and repeatedly force quit the process or processes until the visual distortions disappear.

NOTE: This is not an Obsidian issue per se; however it might be helpful to offer a toggle for disabling GPU rendering until the issue is fixed.

Hello!

Iā€™m getting this previously-reported graphical issue in Obsidian (and in Chrome itself) from time to time that does not go away until I do a full reboot (and seems to come back after a certain amount of time anyway). I believe that this is an issue with Chromium and Appleā€™s GPUs on 16" macbook pros, as gone over in this chromium bug thread.

From that thread, it seems that a temporary stop-gap solution is to disable hardware acceleration, which has actually resolved it on the Chrome side. I canā€™t figure out how to disable it from the Obsidian side, and thatā€™s likely because itā€™s not exposed unless the developer of a chromium application exposes it.

Can the ability to turn off hardware acceleration be an option in the Obsidian UI?

Hereā€™s a screenshot of what I saw earlier today:

2 Likes

@Licat this one might be critically important for a few users!

Iā€™m not too familiar with the command line switches of Electron but can you try the ones mentioned in https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/20702 and let me know if any of them works?

I had similar graphical problems appear in Chrome and Obsidian after suspending and waking up my computer. (Ubuntu 16.04 with Nvidia drivers)

I solved this by using the flag --disable-gpu.

I run Obsidian using ./Obsidian-0.9.3.AppImage --disable-gpu, which disables hardware acceleration.

2 Likes

Spoke more in the Discord, but yeah I ran it like so:

$ ./Obsidian --disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer

ā€¦and havenā€™t seen the issue since. I donā€™t know if that means the problem has gone away entirely, since the problem was intermittent for me before, but Iā€™ll comment on this thread again if I see the issue crop up again.

2 Likes

Iā€™m curiousā€”has anyone whoā€™s disabled GPU acceleration experienced performance losses? I wonder how much of a difference it makes.

I havenā€™t, but I donā€™t have a particularly large database yet. Idk if itā€™d affect folks that do have a large db.

1 Like

Hello,
Today morning everything was ok, but now both editor and preview node are unreadable. All screen is blue. Settings window is ok.

I have last public version of Obsidian 0.9.15, installer was 0.9.3, as os i have MacOS 10.15.7

@TwoBlueCats have you run Obsidian in the manner that I did here?

In order to make the command line app launcher looks nicer, one can refer to this website to make a automator app and put it into your Application folder.

image

Had the same issue on Mac OS with a 16" MacBook Pro. Running the following command resolves it.

/Applications/Obsidian.app/Contents/MacOS/Obsidian --disable-gpu > /dev/null 2>&1 &

The > /dev/nullā€¦ at the end is important, as it will keep the process running in the background until you quit Obsidian.

1 Like

When I opened my Mac this morning and switched to Obsidian, it looked like this:

Tried quitting and re-opening it, but it still happened. Tried logging out and back in again, still the same thing. Itā€™s the only app affected. Iā€™ll try a full reboot, but thinking perhaps something in my theme/css snippets?

This is my config:

{"theme":"obsidian","pluginEnabledStatus":{"file-explorer":true,"global-search":true,"switcher":true,"graph":true,"backlink":true,"command-palette":true,"markdown-importer":false,"word-count":false,"outline":true,"daily-notes":false,"page-preview":true,"open-with-default-app":false,"tag-pane":true},"autoPairMarkdown":false,"showFrontmatter":false,"foldHeading":true,"readableLineLength":false,"attachmentFolderPath":"attachments","hotkeys":{"editor:follow-link":[{"modifiers":["Mod"],"key":"Enter"}],"editor:swap-line-up":[{"modifiers":["Ctrl","Mod"],"key":"ArrowUp"}],"editor:swap-line-down":[{"modifiers":["Ctrl","Mod"],"key":"ArrowDown"}],"editor:open-search-replace":[{"modifiers":["Alt","Mod"],"key":"ʒ"}],"editor:delete-paragraph":[],"editor:toggle-checklist-status":[{"modifiers":["Mod"],"key":"d"}],"app:open-vault":[{"modifiers":["Ctrl","Mod"],"key":"o"}],"editor:focus-left":[{"modifiers":["Mod","Shift"],"key":"["}],"editor:focus-right":[{"modifiers":["Mod","Shift"],"key":"]"}],"workspace:close-others":[{"modifiers":["Alt","Mod"],"key":"āˆ‘"}],"graph:open-local":[{"modifiers":["Ctrl","Mod"],"key":"g"}]},"enabledPlugins":["obsidian-mind-map","cm-editor-syntax-highlight-obsidian","code-block-copy","note-refactor-obsidian","discordian-plugin"],"fileSortOrder":"byModifiedTime","obsidianCss":false,"cssTheme":"Discordian","spellcheck":true,"useTab":false,"trashOption":"local","tabSize":2,"autoConvertHtml":false,"enabledCssSnippets":["Discordian snippets"]}

My CSS snippets:

.theme-dark {
  /* Heading colours */
  --text-title-h1: #E1E3E2;
  --text-title-h2: var(--text-title-h1);
  --text-title-h3: var(--text-title-h1);
  --text-title-h4: var(--text-title-h1);
  --text-title-h5: var(--text-title-h1);

  /* Link colours */
  --text-a: var(--discord-yellow-alt);
  --text-a-hover: var(--discord-yellow-alt-light);

  /* Background colour */
  --background-primary: #2E3235;
}

Steps to reproduce

Not sure - it happens suddenly and it has happened several times.

Expected result

Normal, usable screen.

Actual result

Garbled screen, unusable. Goes away after restarting computer. Doesnā€™t go away after just restarting Obsidian.

Environment

  • Operating system: macOs BigSur
  • Obsidian version: 0.10.11

Additional information

I use Obsidian normally throughout the day. Then, sometimes, I just switch back to Obsidian to find itā€™s screen completely garbled and unusable, as seen in the screenshot Iā€™ve uploaded.

Please help!

I have the green/black glitch @boricic reports above pretty much every morning when I start Obsidian after wake from sleep. I have an external monitor, and unplugging that monitor for 10 seconds and then reconnecting it clears the issue, but itā€™s back the next day.

2 Likes

Seeing this as well, though since Iā€™ve also seen this in Chrome itself I doubt itā€™s actually an Obsidian bug.

Just provide a hopeful news quoted from https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1068170

Comment 257 by [email protected] on Wed, May 5, 2021, 7:11 AM GMT+8 (6 days ago)
Thanks for the feedback.
Appleā€™s just told us that improvements in this area are included in macOS Big Sur 11.4 (beta 2, 20F5055c). Can anyone here test with that beta OS version and help verify?

If someone here has access to this beta, you can have a try.

Looking forward to more good news.

I did install Obsidian a week ago and it was working perfectly fine. Since then I updated my mac (macbook pro 16) to MacOS 11.3.1 (but no issue right after the update)ā€¦I have an issue with the whatā€™s app desktop app as well.

The app has been unusable since then. Zettlr is working fine though