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Brian Clifton edited this page Aug 11, 2025 · 29 revisions

Helping customers with GPU related issues

We (Brave) use the same list as Chromium when it comes to software rendering and driver bugs. There have been bugs we unintentionally introduced with bad patches (ex: conflict patches related to fingerprinting when upgrading Chromium) but this is extremely rare.

FAQ

Things we can have the customer try before proceeding to collect a report

  1. Update Brave to latest version
  2. Update OS (check for updates, etc) to latest version
  3. Update GPU / driver

Also extremely useful to know:

  • Does customer have anything at all under brave://flags/ set as enabled / not default?
  • Ask person if they can try the same steps in Chrome. Does the problem happen for them in Chrome also?

Collecting a report from a person

  1. Collect GPU report. The person experiencing the issue can visit brave://gpu/ to collect information which should help. Specifically, there is a Download Report to File button. The person should save this and share it. If they're unable to launch the browser, have them try some of the troubleshooting steps under step 2 (ex: flag to disable GPU, rename executable).
  2. Help Characterize the issue a bit.
    • Is the browser not working at all?
    • Is there a specific website or websites having the problem? It's important to capture which sites specifically.
    • A common problem is w/ laptops which have an integrated GPU and discrete GPU. Sometimes it can get "stuck" on the discrete one and eat battery life.
    • Have the person try launching Brave with --disable-gpu. Does this help in any way? Does it fix the issue for them?
    • The person might try renaming brave.exe as chrome.exe. If this fixes the issue, the root cause may be an anti-virus or anti-cheat software which is interfering with Brave.
  3. Search our backlog for other occurrences. We have a gpu/driver label which might help find existing reports.
    • If you find an issue matching customer's problem, let's create a new post in that issue and share the information
    • If you can't find anything matching what we have, let's create a new issue. Please add the gpu/driver label.
  4. Employees following this process can notify the appropriate developers in Brave's #user-support channel.
    • For now, this person would be @clifton

Reporting this to upstream

A Brave developer at this point can go through the following steps to escalate to upstream (Chromium).

  1. Visit https://issues.chromium.org/issues and sign into your Brave Chromium account (ex: email-name-here@brave.com).
  2. Use the Create Issue button
    • For Component please specify Chromium > Internals > GPU > Internals
    • You should be able to attach the report that the person collected and share the information.
    • Note for improvement: it would be ideal to report this all under one email / email alias. Like gpu@brave.com. Something that is easy to watch over for multiple developers. Otherwise, all interested parties need to star each issue.
    • If the problem is severe or there hasn't been an update within 1 week, we can email the appropriate folks
      • Draft a new email describing the problem
      • Link to the Chromium bug
      • In the To field, put the following recipients: chrome-gpu@google.com and graphics-dev@chromium.org
  3. Share the issue on Chromium Slack if appropriate
    • We can share the link to the issue and context
    • We can share on Chromium's #gpu-halp channel.
  4. Update the Brave side
    • Once a Chromium bug is created, please share in Brave's #chromium-upstream-cl channel.
    • Update the GitHub issue on our side tracking the problem.
    • Share this update in Brave's #user-support and/or #chromium-upstream-cl as appropriate

Triaging older issues

This only applies to issues created before this process was outlined (6 Aug 2025).

  • We should close older issues where:
    • the problems are not with a recent Chromium version (ex: not the current stable Chromium version or within 2 versions).
    • there hasn't been any activity in > 6 months
    • there isn't enough information to create an upstream report
  • Newer or current issues we should go through this collection process
    • Reach out to person; characterize issue better, notify a developer.
    • If person doesn't respond we can close the issue.
    • Developer can follow above steps to report.

Legacy wiki content

The original content of this page is preserved below as of 6 August 2025. Once we have a documented process on how to handle it will be removed.

This wiki intended to track the problem(s) that folks are experiencing and what steps we've already done / need to do. Will fill this in with more details

For folks having this problem, it's recommended that you update all your video card drivers to the latest official supported version (ex: download latest official drivers from intel.com, nvidia.com, or amd.com). That has resolved many folks

Also worth noting: the driver may expose settings relating to switching between the integrated and discrete video cards in the control panel that is installed. On Windows, you can also right click Brave to check the context menu for an entry like: Run with graphics processor -> High performance NVIDIA processor

Reported customer incidents

GPU taking too much power (using discrete not integrated)

Work-around suggested by support for these folks has been to disable hardware acceleration, which seems to address the problem.

  • https://twitter.com/brendaneich/status/1146191407725441025?s=12 (macOS / 0.65.121)

    Can you please make Brave not eat so much battery on my MacBook Pro? Seriously, just eats battery like a hungry thief, I need to use Safari instead.

  • https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/4858 (macOS / 0.65.118)

    When GPU hardware acceleration is enabled (which is the default) it occurs that some browser window is enabling dedicated GPU (if you have an MBP 15 for example). Which is fine, a lot of modern web pages need that extra power for fancy things. But if you close that window or tab, Brave doesn't switch back to the integrated GPU. So you stay at using the dedicated GPU, which burns your battery. Chrome or other Chromium based browsers do switch back after some time, Brave doesn't.

  • https://community.brave.com/t/brave-wont-change-back-to-integrated-gpu-and-high-battery-usage/47295 (macOS / 0.60.47)

    I have a problem with GPU usage in macos Mojave. When a webpage activates the dedicated GPU it will never go back to the integrated GPU when the webpage is closed. This then reflects in a much higher battery usage. I checked on chrome using the same webpages to trigger the dedicated GPU, and when I close them, always revert automatically to the integrated.

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/c1fyal/absurd_cpu_and_gpu_performance/ (macOS / ??)

    Is there a reason it is using my radeon gpu chip instead of my intel chip? Some games I run do not even use the high performance chip; I just do not understand why it requires high performance when certain game do not (mac from used 2016), let alone a browser

  • https://twitter.com/samwightt/status/1213668945678475265 (Windows / 1.1.23)

    Only thing that's keeping me from using it is that on my Surface Book 2 it defaults to using my GTX 1060 instead of integrated graphics, which DRAINS the battery. Using Chrome for now :(

Bad Web GL performance

Whilst playing around with some WebGL 2 code I noticed that fps seemed to be roughly half of what Chrome was chucking out. Rendering 2 million cubes produced around 29fps whilst in Chrome it easily hit 60fps.

Still bad after the field trial updates ☹️

Hi @bsclifton, unfortunately performance is the same. Still down at around 10fps (I've changed the test a bit so fps has dropped but it's same on Stable) on my test whereas Chrome is getting about 45fps.

Tested on Version 0.69.24 Chromium: 75.0.3770.100 (Official Build) nightly (64-bit) that I just installed.

A while ago when it first released, I tried playing Minecraft Classic in Brave but it was very laggy and basically unplayable. I thought it was an issue with that specific game until last night when I released a simple game I made with a WebGL version and I tried to play it in Brave but it was extremely slow, especially when going into fullscreen mode

GPU related artifacts

Basically rendering looks wrong (or not at all). Extremely slow performance. Work-around has been for users to disabled hardware acceleration (either in UI or via --disable-gpu command line flag).

My Brave experience has become so horrible. A new tab takes 3-5 secs, typing in the url bar has a lag of multiple seconds. While typing, the window turns to garbage. I deleted ~/Library/Application Support/Brave* and reinstalled and it's the same. ... It's only a brave issue and for me it didn't start until the Dev release w/ ads (0.63.x).

Search suggestion panel is not fully visible while typing in omnibox. Moreover, sometimes there are some graphical artifacts (see screenshots in "Actual result").

Screen text garbled unreadable.

totally blank user interface. only visible is popup menu (when right clicking) all other browsers are working correctly (chrome, opera, firefox)

Whenever I open the browser, strange text fragmentation can be seen. It sometimes happens when I open the site, sometimes only after I interact with it. This isn't contained to website, also Brave intern sites like the settings or the DevTools are affected. Also on scrolling the text flickers into different fragmentations.

On many sites, text is showing as glitched/half showing. I've had this issue since moving to muon

The ui is disintegrating. it keeps on disintegraating. i tried uninstalling and installing the browser. also i tried ll the releases like beta, dev, nightly but in all there’s a same problem. can you help me solve it?

Things that have been done which may help

Field trial config was changed in 0.68.x

This would ship to release channel on August 20th. Work was done in the following PRs:

Untriaged list of links / occurrences / etc that should be looked at

Reported links that don't seem to be associated

Actions we can take (help needed)

  • Values that were changed with the field trials should be examined. This config change will make us more closely match Chrome/Chromium. We may have had a flag enabled which made Brave prefer the discrete GPU - or perhaps we had a flag on which bypassed the driver blacklist
  • Triage the above occurrences and break down by OS / Brave version
  • Find more occurrences and triage
  • Verify on macOS that we have added the NSSupportsAutomaticGraphicsSwitching key to Brave's info.plist (UPDATE: @bsclifton verified it is there and set to true)
  • Join https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/forum/graphics-dev and share occurrences / details

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