Updating GPU drivers whilst Steam is open breaks it entirely

[Wanyal]

ISSUE
When updating graphics drivers (only Nvidia tested here) causes the Steam client to go black and be unusable until client restarts. Some features are broken until reboot.

OS
Windows 11

STEPS

1. Open Steam
   
2. Update Nvidia drivers, wait until completion

RESULTS
Steam window is entirely black and is unusable until the client is restarted. Some things do not work even after client restart, such as dragging the top bar of the main window to move the window.

EXPECTED
Steam is just as usable after updating graphics drivers as it was before without need for restart

[p0k314NET]

Reading the same thing for the umpteenth time, I think Valve should accelerate the abandonment of Windows 7 and move to a new version of Chromium. This system, otherwise a very good one, is dead today anyway, six months won't change anything but it will help current users. But that's just my opinion.

[Tharon]

You know that Windows 7 can run CEF until version 109, while Steam still uses version 85 released almost three years ago ?

[RiO]

Originally posted by p0k314NET:

Reading the same thing for the umpteenth time, I think Valve should accelerate the abandonment of Windows 7 and move to a new version of Chromium. This system, otherwise a very good one, is dead today anyway, six months won't change anything but it will help current users. But that's just my opinion.

Moving to a new version of CEF and Chromium doesn't help.

The problem is the Steam Client doesn't respond to the driver reset signals that Windows sends to the process's main window loop and doesn't forward those to the embedded Chromium instance, which - as it is embedded, and doesn't have its own main window loop - can't do that automatically.

This is the same reason Chromium in the Steam client keeps eating RAM and CPU even when the window is minimized or when an exclusive fullscreen mode game is active. Chromium itself doesn't have a window. It doesn't know when it does and does not have foreground focus. It does not know when it should and should not bother updating rendered content because users won't be able to see it or interact with it. It has to be told by the owning process.

CEF handles that to some degree. But far from all of it.


This is the same reason the Steam Client randomly black-screens for some people.

Chromium's renderer is blazing fast because Google tries to eek every bit of performance out of it that they can with a myriad of dangerous optimizations that more often than not backfire on particular driver versions that have bad interplay with them.

When that happens the video driver partially hangs and is issued what is called a partial reset. Resources belonging to the process that caused the crash are invalidated when this reset happens and the process is sent a signal that the old device was removed and a new one was added.

Chromium normally responds to that by killing its old renderer instance and starting a new one. Which happens so fast most users won't even notice.
But of course; the Steam Client - as I mentioned earlier - doesn't process those window messages properly and doesn't forward them to Chromium. So it remains stuck with broken rendering resources and the user is left staring at a black screen.

[Cablenexus]

My steam client start moving to the edge of the screen and disappeared after updating nvidia driver while client was open.

[p0k314NET]

Originally posted by RiO:

Originally posted by p0k314NET:

Reading the same thing for the umpteenth time, I think Valve should accelerate the abandonment of Windows 7 and move to a new version of Chromium. This system, otherwise a very good one, is dead today anyway, six months won't change anything but it will help current users. But that's just my opinion.

Chromium's renderer is blazing fast because Google tries to eek every bit of performance out of it that they can with a myriad of dangerous optimizations that more often than not backfire on particular driver versions that have bad interplay with them.

And that's why I think an upgrade to the latest version of Chromium should bring much higher stability. New version = new, updated code and support for new graphics cards including current blacklists and whitelists. Will not fix all the problems like memory hog, but IMHO stability should. How old is the current CEF used on Steam? 2-3 years? Whereas why Steam doesn't use the late 2022 version 109 - so, this question should not be put to me (old Linux systems compatibility, especially those based on *buntu branch?).

Originally posted by Cablenexus:

My steam client start moving to the edge of the screen and disappeared after updating nvidia driver while client was open.

Its normal. CEF poorly tolerates GPU driver reset. And not only CEF. It is best practice to close all applications on the screen before updating the drivers.