My system is a MacBook4,1 with an integrated Intel GPU (965GM chipset). I use Google Chrome through an AUR package (yay -S google-chrome), and sometime within the past month I’ve started experiencing an occasional issue. Every so often, the screen goes entirely blank - not just the browser window but the whole screen. The screen comes back after a few seconds, but sometimes the UI is briefly unresponsive and Chrome has to be quit from the Task Manager. This does not happen with Firefox.
I stumbled across this post: Google Chrome Prime Nvidia drivers force integrated gpu and although it doesn’t mention the screen blanking issue, it does mention a change in Chrome where it is defaulting to Vulkan video acceleration, which seemed like a good lead. I tried disabling the Vulkan flags in chrome://flags, but that didn’t seem to work - the screen blanking still occurred.
Has anyone else had this experience and found a way around it?