[Rpi5] Significant screen tearing on Balena Browser

[bopete1313]

Hi,

We use balena browser for our project and we’ve noticed a lot of screen tearing on Rpi5. I tried adding --use-gl=egl which gets rid of the tearing.. but seemingly breaks GPU acceleration (aquarium test website drops to ~6fps from ~50fps). I’ve pondered about potentially getting chromium running with wayland to see if there’s a difference, but I haven’t ventured down that road yet.

NOTE: Currently balena browser’s performance is decreased by 10fps if you’re running an EEPROM greater than v2024.11.12. So before testing I recommend checking out this thread: [Pi5] glmark2 in latest RPI OS shows a 35% decrease in performance when using EEPROM version v2025.01.22-2 vs 2024.11.12 - Raspberry Pi Forums

Any idea how the tearing can be fixed?

Video example of tearing issue:
https://imgur.com/a/vvixLXI

Any help would be appreciated!

Hardware: Rpi 5 4GB + 1920x1080 touchscreen on HDMI 0
OS: balenaOS 6.5.50+rev2

EEPROM: v2024.11.12 (newest eeprom also exhibits the issue)
Browser: deregtd’s balena browser image ( Poor WebGL performance on RPi5 · Issue #172 · balena-io-experimental/browser · GitHub )

Browser env vars: ENABLE_GPU=1, EXTRA_FLAGS=–kiosk --disable-pinch
Overlay: vc4-kms-v3d
No overclocking

Thanks,
Brian