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Any ideas why this is happening with Google Chrome?

chrome break screen

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Your screenshots are displaying repeating patterns of video artifacts which are characteristic of video RAM artifacts.

If your computer screen is displaying video RAM artifacts, then it would show up first in Google Chrome because Google Chrome uses a lot of RAM. Chrome splits every tab, plugin, and extension into its own process, so that if one thing crashes it doesn’t bring down the whole webpage. Chrome’s prerendering feature can also cause higher memory usage.

If the RAM in your graphics card is failing, sometimes just a small fraction of the RAM goes bad while the rest of the RAM continues to work properly. This can result in a screen that looks like a fraction of the screen has glitchy repeating patterns of video artifacts, while the rest of the screen is rendered properly. As a workaround in Chrome, browse to Settings -> Show advanced settings... -> scroll down to the System heading and uncheck the checkbox to the left of Use hardware acceleration when available.

Hardware acceleration in Chrome can also be temporarily disabled from the command line in OS X by starting Chrome using the --disable-gpu Google Chrome command line switch as follows:

open -a "Google Chrome" --args --disable-gpu  
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  • I would've never had the answer for why only part of Chrome was displaying artifacts. +1 for covering all bases
    – Insane
    Oct 14, 2015 at 7:09
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    I wonder if hardware accelerated rendering might play a part.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Oct 14, 2015 at 7:13
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    @karel, >>As a workaround in Chrome, browse to Settings ->. It's impossible, because all Chrome looks like this. Oct 14, 2015 at 7:24
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    Hmm, disabling hardware acceleration fixed it for me.
    – javanix
    Oct 15, 2015 at 14:31
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    Interesting that many are seeing the same issue at the same time however - seems surprising that all of our VRAM has gotten simultaneously corrupted - superuser.com/questions/986618/…
    – javanix
    Oct 15, 2015 at 14:32

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