If your YouTube watching has been plagued with an occasional checkerboard effect in recent years, you may have cause for celebration—the Windows 11 KB5037853 Preview build offers a fix.
The issue seems to have affected those using Chromium-based browsers to playback video on certain GPUs, with some Nvidia RTX card owners complaining of visual distortions and garbled video output.
While there are multiple workarounds (and reports that previous Windows updates may have fixed the issue), our Nick has confirmed that the bug is no longer present on his RTX 4080 Super machine since the recent update, which lists in its notes that:
"This update addresses an issue that distorts parts of the screen. This occurs when you use a Chromium-based browser to play a video."
While some have pointed the finger at Nvidia drivers or Chrome for causing the problem, whatever was changed behind the scenes in Windows 11 seems to have done the trick. Checkerboards and garbled video outputs are gone for good, it seems, and you can now go back to consuming vast amounts of video as fast as your eyeballs will allow, with no ugly distractions.
Those who are not signed up for Windows Preview builds can do so by clicking the "get the latest updates as soon as they're available" toggle in Windows Update settings, and install the latest version from there.
It's not just bug fixes in the latest release, either. New features include mouse dragging between breadcrumbs in the File Explorer address bar, a "Linked Devices" page in account settings for managing multiple PCs and Xbox consoles, and a new account manager for the Start menu.
Still, this certainly sounds like it was an annoying problem, and one many will be glad to see the back of. Although I haven't personally witnessed it on my main machine with its AMD card. See, there are advantages to going team red! If only ray tracing performance was one of them…
