[Updated] Google Chrome images distorted & pixelated after latest update for some (workarounds inside)

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Original story (published on February 19, 2022) follows:

Google Chrome is the world’s most popular internet browser. With more than 63% worldwide market share on all types of devices.

It is based on the Chromium engine, an open-source project that also powers other browsers such as Brave and Microsoft Edge.

But due to the developers frequently updating Chrome with new features and improving on existing ones, some bugs and issues do surface from time to time.

And now, Chrome users are saying (1,2,3) that some of the images are either distorted or pixelated. Reports suggest that even the Google logo is distorted. While the images look normal upon zooming in, they are pixelated when the zoom is at 100%.

The issue is not only limited to the Google search icons but YouTube thumbnails and Google forms are also affected. You can see in the image below what the problem looks like.

Sometimes, some icons/images will become pixelated like in the screenshot. But when I zoom in the page, they slowly become normal. When I zoom out the page, it become more severe.(For this google search case, it looks pixelated when in 100% zoom, so zooming out make no change, but for other images that only have slight effect, zooming out make it more severe and finally become like the search icon.) However, if I switch tab multiple times, it will become normal for a while, and then become pixelated again.
(Source)

Twitter images and Google search preview icons pixelated
So two days ago Twitter and Google images started to look pixelated it happens on other websites too, tried uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome, but it didnt work. This only happens on chrome i tried other web browsers and they work perfectly fine so im assuming its Chrome.
(Source)

While Google is yet to say anything on the matter, some say reinstalling the browser did the trick for them. Others say turning off ‘Hardware Acceleration’ helped fix the pixelated image problem.

Glad I’m not the only one having this issue after the latest Chrome update. It seems like the fix to this one problem is turning “Hardware Acceleration” off in the advance settings of Chrome. Though I needed that turned on so the browser game I’m playing won’t lag. This really seems to be a problem on Chrome’s end as I have tried Firefox, Edge and Vivaldi with Hardware Acceleration “on” and never got this issue aside from Chrome’s. My graphics card is also updated to the latest version.
(Source)

But turning off Hardware acceleration isn’t a viable solution since it may cause performance issues. As always, we will be keeping an eye out on the matter and update this article once Google fixes the issue so stay tuned.

06:06 pm (IST): One of our readers suggested a workaround that involves disabling the GPU rasterization in chrome://flags/. So, if you are still having this issue, then you can try this solution.

Thanks for the tip: Patrick Pan!

05:12 pm (IST): A product expert in the Google community has now confirmed that this issue has been fixed server-side. Moreover, some users may need to relaunch Chrome to get the fix.

Note: We have more such stories in our dedicated Google Section so be sure to follow them as well.

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