This is not a ‘disable hardware acceleration’ “solution” or workaround post. Fix at the bottom.
Some people may have noticed after the windows 11 24H2 update that they began to experience issues with electron/chromium based apps(Discord, VSCode, Chrome itself) when being alt-tabbed out of a game. Frequently, it will appear as if only parts of the interface are being updated, maybe you scrolling down a chat, but only a third of it is scrolling and the rest appears frozen in place. Rarely, it manifests in having the image stuck and only updating around the mouse cursor. Tabbing to a different window and back would restore things back to normal for a short time. People also describe this as tearing or glitching, all rather generic terms that make searching for this topic fun. You also can’t screen record it occurring.
Based on posts mentioning these symptoms, this has only been an issue for ~7 months if you were an early adopter. Microsoft doesn’t discriminate between AMD and NVIDIA. Circulating workarounds included disabling hardware acceleration, disabling MPO(Multiplane Overlay(not to be confused with Discord’s overlay)), or forcing the ANGLE backend to something other than D3D11. These all have downsides. I can’t be content with an answer being to use software rendering in 2025, MPOs are needed to remove the latency penalty of playing games in borderless windowed mode, and the last one is.. complicated to explain. I’m pretty sure you already have MPO enabled if you have this issue, but you can verify its status by: Start -> dxdiag -> Save All Information -> search saved text for MPO MaxPlanes: being greater than 1(probably 4) followed by many MPO related lines.
The cause? Microsoft.. specifically Desktop Window Manager(DWM) and it’s interaction with MPO. As for why, when using PresentMon, I noticed VSCode and Discord would have their flip presentation model fluctuate between Composed: Flip and Hardware Composed: Independent Flip during active usage, the latter I believe is when a MPO plane is assigned. Discord doesn’t need to render out a new frame if nothing has changed, thus its overall fps can be rather low. When interacting with the GUI, frames are rendered to respond to your input and can trigger DWM to change its flip model. It seems something goes very wrong with this back and forth behavior. Interestingly, Firefox doesn’t appear in PresentMon and doesn’t have an issue.
After periodically searching on the issue over a couple months and enjoying Google’s degraded search quality, Google finally pitied me and I stumbled across Microsoft documenting a single registry key. I set OverlayMinFPS to 0, restarted DWM and my issue was magically fixed. PresentMon reported that VsCode and Discord now stayed in Hardware Composed: Independent Flip while focused. For redundancy, Microsoft’s description of this key:
A DWORD. If this value is present and set to zero, the Desktop Window Manager disables its minimum frame rate requirement for assigning DirectX swap chains to overlay planes in hardware that supports overlays. This makes it more likely that a low frame rate swap chain will get assigned and stay assigned to an overlay plane, if available. This mechanism was introduced in its present form in Windows 11. This registry value may be modified or removed in future releases.
The fix: You can manually add the OverlayMinFPS key as a DWORD (32-bit) value with RegEdit or save and run the following as dwm_mpo_fix.reg. Afterward in Task Manager, end the task for Desktop Window Manager. It will auto restart on its own.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Dwm] "OverlayMinFPS"=dword:00000000
If you previously disabled MPO, don’t forget to re-enable it by removing the OverlayTestMode key and restart pc.
