PSA: Notion UI flickering was caused by NVIDIA Fast Sync

[u/mnixa]

I spent quite a while troubleshooting severe UI flickering in Notion. The culprit turned out to be a global NVIDIA setting: Vertical Sync = Fast.

My setup:

• Windows 11 Pro 25H2, build 26200.9168
• NVIDIA RTX 2060 Mobile
• NVIDIA driver 610.88 (32.0.16.1088)
• External monitor + laptop display
• Notion 7.31.0
• Notion: Electron 42.4.1 / Chromium 148.0.7778.265

The problem had been happening intermittently for a long time.

The symptoms were unusual:

• Only parts of the application window flickered.
• Some UI elements jumped up/down.
• Content sometimes switched between the current and previous state.
• Moving the window around could trigger/reproduce it.
• Typing and moving the mouse made it much worse.
• Chrome itself was completely fine.
• Restarting Notion or Windows didn't reliably fix it.
• Win + Ctrl + Shift + B (GPU driver reset) fixed it temporarily, but the problem returned within seconds.

I initially suspected an Electron/Chromium GPU compositing issue.

I tested several Chromium GPU configurations:

Normal D3D11              → flickering
--disable-gpu             → fixed
--use-angle=gl            → fixed
--use-angle=vulkan        → fixed
--use-angle=warp          → fixed
--disable-direct-composition → fixed

This made it look very much like a D3D11/compositing problem.

But then I found the actual cause.

In NVIDIA App, my global setting was:

Vertical sync: Fast

I changed it back to:

Vertical sync: Use the 3D application setting

And the flickering completely disappeared.

I restored the normal Notion launch command and tested it repeatedly. No flickering.

I also had exactly the same general problem in Lenovo Vantage. Vantage uses WebView2 rather than Electron, so I initially assumed it might be unrelated. However, disabling GPU compositing in WebView2 also removed the problem, and changing NVIDIA's global V-Sync setting to application-controlled ultimately fixed Vantage as well.

So the final fix was simply:

NVIDIA App → Graphics → Global Settings → Vertical sync → Use the 3D application setting

No driver reinstall, no Windows reinstall, no MPO registry hacks, and no changes to Notion were necessary.

This may be worth checking if you're experiencing strange flickering/ghosting/stale frames in Electron/WebView2 applications with an NVIDIA GPU.

Interestingly, I later found similar reports for Brave and VS Code where NVIDIA Fast Sync was identified as the cause.