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

allcaps — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 03:43:43 GMT

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.

allcaps Tracker

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