I'm experiencing a persistent issue with screen tearing and stuttering while using Opera Air, which I haven't encountered in other Chromium-based browsers. I've been using Microsoft Edge for several years and also tested Brave—both perform smoothly under identical conditions. Unfortunately, the standard version of Opera exhibits the same problem as Opera Air.
The issue is most noticeable when scrolling through web pages. On certain sites, the stutters are so severe that they resemble major lags. Initially, I suspected the browser might be locked to 60fps while my display supports 90Hz, but the problem seems to go beyond simple frame rate mismatch.
Here’s what I’ve tried so far, with no improvement:
Toggled the Smooth Scrolling setting.
Enabled/disabled Hardware Acceleration.
Experimented with different ANGLE graphics backends via opera://flags.
Updated to the latest GPU drivers.
One thing that stood out during troubleshooting was unusually high GPU utilization. While using Opera Air, my integrated GPU (Intel Iris Xe) sometimes spikes to 80% usage, which seems excessive for basic browsing tasks. I tried to compare it with Edge.
What I did was make a search request in DuckDuckGo and was scrolling from top to down (it was already enough to have screen tearing in Opera) to see results in task manager. Results were up to 30% GPU utilization in Edge and up to 80% in Opera Air.
DuckDuckGo.png Left Edge Right Opera
I also did same test on main page of Nvidia (for some reason this site stutters heavily on Opera. Results were the same.
Nvidia.pngLeft Edge Right Opera
This leads me to believe the stuttering may be linked to GPU overutilization in Opera.
I want to emphasize that I really enjoy using Opera Air—its features and design are fantastic. I’d love to continue using it as my primary browser, but this performance issue is a major hurdle. I’d be grateful for any guidance or fixes you can offer.
My specs (ASUS Zenbook 14):
Intel i5 1240P
Windows 11
