How to Disable the Google Chrome ‘GPU rasterization’ Flag

The GPU Rasterization Feature

Google Chrome is highly optimized to use your computer’s graphics hardware. When Chrome builds the visual layout of a webpage (turning HTML and CSS code into the pixels you actually see), it performs a process called “rasterization.” By default, Chrome attempts to offload this rasterization process from the CPU directly to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The “GPU rasterization” flag dictates whether this hardware acceleration should be forced on, left to default heuristics, or disabled entirely.

While GPU rasterization dramatically speeds up the rendering of complex, image-heavy websites on modern computers, it is highly dependent on flawless graphics drivers. If you are using an older computer, a Linux machine with experimental open-source drivers, or a low-end integrated graphics chip, the GPU may struggle with the workload. This often results in a “checkerboard” effect when scrolling quickly, pages rendering completely blank, or the entire browser crashing with hardware faults. If Chrome’s rendering is glitchy or unstable, you should disable GPU rasterization and force the more stable (though slightly slower) CPU to handle the rendering.

How to Turn Off GPU Rasterization

You can force Chrome to use CPU rendering via the experimental flags menu.

1. Open Google Chrome (if the browser is too glitchy to read, try launching it from the command line with --disable-gpu-rasterization first).
2. Click inside the main address bar at the top of the browser.
3. Type chrome://flags and press Enter.
4. A page titled “Experiments” will load.
5. In the search bar at the top, type GPU rasterization.
6. The specific flag will appear highlighted in yellow. Next to it is a dropdown menu.
7. Change the dropdown menu setting to Disabled.
8. Click the blue Relaunch button at the bottom of the screen.

Upon restarting, Chrome will stop sending rasterization workloads to your graphics card, relying entirely on software rendering for page layouts, which instantly resolves most visual artifacting and checkerboard bugs.