I have been experiencing some very, very odd issues with Chromium on Windows 10 and 11. I tried two different Chromium based browsers (Chrome and Brave), and they both do the same.
A little about my setup: 1x 4K monitor, 1x 1440p monitor, 1x 1080p monitor, Ryzen 3900X, RTX 3070, and 32GB of RAM. All monitors are set to 100% DPI in Windows and they run at native resolution with latest Nvidia drivers as well.
When a browser is maximized on my 1080p monitor and an animation is playing, such as Facebook's "someone is typing a comment" or just regular CSS animations, video playback on the 4K and 1440p monitors start to lag completely, resulting in the videos going stuck at some point (infinite buffering). The very second I switch tabs or the animations on the 1080p monitor stops, the video starts playing again.
I originally had this problem in Windows 10, but I decided to completely wipe my SSD and install Windows 11. I installed Brave and decided not to import any settings from Chrome, so it was a perfect default installation. However, the exact same problem happens.
If I turn off hardware acceleration in chrome://flags and restart the browsers, it works flawlessly. Video playback is fine, although 4K 60 FPS on YouTube is a bit choppy at times. If I don't maximize the browser and it just runs in a window, it works flawlessly as well.
At this point I'm suspecting a couple of things could be wrong:
- Chromium (unlikely as nobody else has reported this problem afaik)
- Hardware (CPU, GPU, motherboard)
Here's a list of things I have tried:
- Different HDMI cable
- Different port on the GPU
- Swap the monitor with another 1080p monitor
- Reinstall Windows
- Change resolutions, refresh rate, etc. of all monitors
To see a recorded example using my phone (just to rule out any PC issues), here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufsDsV6_HCg
When the animation is playing, the video playback stops. When I switch to this post's tab (where there are no animations), it resumes the video playback.
Where do I even begin to debug this behavior? There are no errors in the Event Viewer or anywhere else I've looked.