Chrome Hardware Acceleration Issues in Ubuntu 22.04

I just got a fancy new Lenovo ThinkPad T14 laptop in the summer. I had my first ThinkPad in 2005 and I'm a big fan of the sturdy build quality and the excellent ergonomics. And also, running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad is usually a breeze.

My First AMD ThinkPad

This time I got my first ThinkPad with an AMD processor. It's AMD Ryzen Pro 7, to be specific. I'm not sure if it's the processor support in Linux in general, or if there's some issues in Ubuntu with this hardware, but I've run into some issues that I've never experienced before. I haven't had enough time to really pinpoint the issue.

Basically, the problem is that my screen goes completely blank every now and then. It only lasts less than a second, but it's really annoying. It happens randomly both on the external monitor and the internal display. Sometimes only one of them goes blank, and sometimes they both do.

Chrome Hardware Acceleration

I googled some forums and some people have had problems with Google Chrome on this same hardware. Some people reported that disbaling hardware acceleration in Chrome settings helped. I started wondering if this is also a Chrome related issue. And indeed, I don't have the screen blanking issue if I don't have Chrome running.

I tried disabling the hardware acceleration mode in Chrome settings it looks like the issue has been fixed now. I disabled the mode just a few hours ago but I haven't got s single blank screen since that. I haven't really investigated what the hardware acceleration does under the hood and what's the underlying issue in this case, but it looks like I've found the culprit for these annoying issues.