CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-code
Drelcj
Drelcj

Reputation: 31

Why does VS Code give a chip-like / distorted display when I hover over it with my mouse?

This is the view I get when I try to use my VS Code:

how can I fix it?

I have reinstalled and restarted my system, but no headway. Whenever I open VS Code and want to start a project, it becomes increasingly worse as I hover my mouse, I initially thought my general display had issues, it doesn't affect other apps, just VS Code.

What can I do?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4422

Answers (2)

Gino Mempin
Gino Mempin

Reputation: 29635

Try disabling hardware acceleration.

From https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_40#_disable-gpu-acceleration

Disable GPU acceleration

We have heard issue reports from users that seem related to how the GPU is used to render VS Code's UI. These users have a much better experience when running VS Code with the additional --disable-gpu command-line argument. Running with this argument will disable the GPU hardware acceleration and fall back to a software renderer.

To make life easier, you can add this flag as a setting so that it does not have to be passed on the command line each time.

To add this flag:

  • Open the Command Palette (⇧⌘P).
  • Run the Preferences: Configure Runtime Arguments command.
  • This command will open a argv.json file to configure runtime arguments. You might see some default arguments there already.
  • Add "disable-hardware-acceleration": true.
  • Restart VS Code.

Note: Do not use this setting unless you are seeing issues!

Upvotes: 3

Kamen Minkov
Kamen Minkov

Reputation: 3747

While the other answer that suggests disabling GPU acceleration might work, it's not a full solution, only a step towards narrowing down the cause of the problem.

I've seen this happen with Nvidia GPUs. The culprit is image sharpening, which might work for some other scenarios where you need to render something lower resolution and then upscale it, but not here (where you're rendering native resolution to begin with). For some reason, in some previous versions of the driver, it was present and enabled by default. According to some sources, it was removed as of driver version 496.76.

Just for future reference, if you happen to have this problem and you're running an Nvidia GPU, go to the Control Panel -> Manage 3D settings and either 1) look for Image Sharpening in the Global Settings tab and turn it off, or 2) go to Program Settings, add the path to VSCode, then turn Image Sharpening off there. I'd expect this to happen with a legacy GPU that doesn't receive new drivers any more.

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions