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allcaps
Stadia Player
Stadia Player

Chrome on Mac has jerky mouse movement no matter what fixes are tried

I'm a new Stadia user, and while I am enjoying the service, I'm having mouse issues on macOS and none of the fixes commonly found on the internet have solved the issue. I've tried so much voodoo at this point that I'm confident this is a problem with Chrome itself and not with my own system.

Here is the issue:

All of my description relates to Destiny 2, but it's the same in every game that uses mouse input. Moving forward or backwards with the keyboard results in perfectly smooth video. Graphical quality is fine and latency is good. Moving the view with the mouse is very jerky, and stutters at regular intervals of about every 60ms or so. Making sweeping movements with the mouse makes this very obvious. Doing the same movements with a controller results in smooth video with none of the issues seen when using a mouse. This applies to both a Stadia controller in wifi mode and to normal gamepads connected to the Mac via bluetooth.

Here is my setup:

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports), 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, macOS 12.0.1, connected via gigabit ethernet. Using the very latest Chrome, though I have tried literally everything below using Chrome, Chrome Canary, and Edge.

Here is what I've tried, unless noted none of these made any difference at all:

  • Setting the polling rate of my mouse to every possible setting between 125hz and 1000hz
  • Trying every possible combination of DPI settings on my mouse and tracking speed settings in the control panel
  • Setting the refresh rate of my screen to every possible setting between 60hz and 165hz, including variable refresh mode
  • Using different mice, from high quality gaming mice to junky bluetooth no-names
  • Trying the trackpad
  • Using the built-in display, using various external displays
  • Turning off mouse acceleration via terminal
  • Turning off location services and wifi direct
  • Turning off "shake to locate" in accessibility preferences
  • Turning off literally every accessibility preference
  • Using the Stadia enhance extension to try different combinations of codecs and resolutions
  • Using no extensions at all
  • Using incognito/inprivate sessions
  • Changing various flags in chrome://flags relating to hardware video decoding and acceleration
  • Resetting all of the flags in chrome://flags
  • Trying Chrome without vsync or frame limit via command line arguments
  • Quitting every single other piece of software on the machine, everything no matter how small
  • Trying wifi
  • Using a totally different Mac to test all of the above again

At this point I genuinely have nothing left to try. I have a Windows laptop that mouse input works perfectly on. On that machine I can play Destiny 2 practically like it's a native game the mouse feels so good. The mouse input on all the macs I've tried is so jerky it almost gives me motion sickness. I have a Stadia controller and a ChromeCast Ultra that Stadia work amazingly well on. The issue is not network related, and as I get perfectly smooth gameplay on the mac when using the Stadia controller I don't think it's performance related either. Something about Chrome on Mac results in horribly jerky movement. I've tried this on multiple Macs that belong to myself and others and the mouse smoothness is the same and horrible on all of them.

I've installed Windows 10 via Boot Camp and can confirm that under Windows this problem does not exist. Video and mouse input are perfectly smooth. This is only a problem in macOS.

Am I alone in this? I see various other threads on this, but they all fizzle out with people saying that one or another of the above have fixed the issue for them.

3 Kudos
3 Replies
MrVacca
Platinum Stadia Guide
Platinum Stadia Guide

Hi @allcaps - You are not alone in this, although you're the first post I've seen that isn't using a newer M1 Mac.  There was just a thread yesterday discussing how MacOS has some issues but were unclear on what was causing the issue.  I was able to find these user posts on Apple's forums requesting for patches to fix it.  Sorry for the hassle. 

1 Kudo
razfaz23
Founder
Founder

Hi folks,

I had experienced the same (Macbook Air 2019). While this is not my primary gaming system, I wanted to see how the Macbook Air and MacOS will handle it. I had two problems: 1) jittery mouse movement 2) drasitically impacted performance  causing heavy frame drops (chrome CPU utilisation was through the roof. I realised that I has having this only when using an external mouse but not using the buit-in trackpad. 

After some digging what fixed it for me was reducing the mouse polling rate to 125Hz. I see that you have tried this already. However, this did not fix it entirely for me. I am using the Stadia advanced Chrome extension to force VP9 codec for improved visuals, but it appears Apple are not supporting this format. Instead they are relying on H264 (which is the fallback for Stadia, if VP9 is not hardware-decoded), or H265, which is not supported by Stadia.

Setting this to H264 further improved this for me, of course at the expense of visual fidelity as H264 is inferior to VP9, H265, or AV1. I have seen articles that Stadia may switch to AV1, which is the new kid on the block.

I still have to stay it was not perfect and I had occasional performance/fps drops, but this was a general issue. While this is a Macbook Air, you could still tell the OS was not that snappy anymore. Therefore, I wiped the system and reinstalled Monterey as a fresh install instead. Performance is generally much better, system is much quieter, and Stadia performance is ok.

But again, ultimately this is just a Macbook air, though reinstalling fresh, reducing mouse polling to 125Hz (Logitech G502), and forcing H264 drastically improved FPS and mouse jitter for me. In the end, at least based on my experience, MacOS is not the best platform for gaming in general or Stadia performance. 

2 Kudos
MrVacca
Platinum Stadia Guide
Platinum Stadia Guide

Brilliant @razfaz23 - thank you for your insightful response!!! 

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