Checking if your GPU is causing the problem

If you encounter flickering or other rendering issues, you can stop Pulsar from using your Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) with the --disable-gpu Chromium flag to see if the fault lies with your GPU:

$ pulsar --disable-gpu

Chromium (and thus Pulsar) normally uses the GPU to accelerate drawing parts of the interface. --disable-gpu tells Pulsar to not even attempt to do this, and just use the CPU for rendering everything. This means that the parts of the interface that would normally be accelerated using the GPU will instead take slightly longer and render on the CPU. This likely won’t make a noticeable difference, but does slightly increase the battery usage on portable devices as the CPU has to work harder to do the things the GPU is optimized for.

Two other Chromium flags that are useful for debugging are --enable-gpu-rasterization and --force-gpu-rasterization:

$ pulsar --enable-gpu-rasterization --force-gpu-rasterization

--enable-gpu-rasterization allows other commands to determine how a layer tile (graphics) should be drawn and --force-gpu-rasterization determines that the Skia GPU backend should be used for drawing layer tiles (only valid with GPU accelerated compositing).

Any Pulsar flags specified after the Chromium flags will be ignored, so make sure you include those before the Chromium flags:

$ pulsar --safe --enable-gpu-rasterization --force-gpu-rasterization