What is Skia and why is it tanking my refresh rate?

So I recently did a fresh install of Windows and I found all my LibreOffice apps to be having a problem I’ve occasionally had previous - on my 165hz monitor the apps seemed to not be scrolling or updating with new characters smoothly.

Now historically this issue has only happened to me when I’ve installed the Fresh version of LO and not the Stable one; but this time it was happening to me on Stable. So I rooted around and found one other topic here from early 2020 saying that the window is running about 15fps, which piqued my interest because that terrible framerate seemed to be about what mine was running as well. However, the only solution in that topic seemed to be to fiddle with Nvidia control panel, which seems an insane solution when I know the program has previously run smoothly out of the box.

However, there was also a suggestion made to go toggle OpenGL in LibreOffice > View under Tools; I did not find this option but I did find something called Skia, and upon disabling it LO ran perfectly smooth as it once had. Not sure what this Skia thing is, but please know it has some truly dreadful performance implications for LO on Windows.

I am running Windows 10 Pro 21H2 Build 19044.1415, an Nvidia 1080TI on latest drivers, my main window is a 1440p 165hz monitor with G-sync enabled for windowed applications (perhaps a cause of the issue?), secondary monitor is 1080p 60hz (perhaps a mixed refresh rate issue? but LO is on the 165hz monitor).

Graphics-related issues ( Skia )

Can that help?

That would help, yes, but I’m more past the Needing A Solution bit and more into the Why Did This Ship Enabled By Default phase

Because Skia is relatively new and somebody with your graphics card hasn’t let the developers know it doesn’t work with it. How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Wiki

The previous solution, OpenGL, had a denylist on which a number of graphics cards were listed, including my Intel UHD Graphics 620, so it was off by default.

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