Occasional solid color flashing/flickering with GTX970 on 384.47

After installing 384.47 on a system with two 4K monitors connected by DisplayPort, I get an occasional flash/flicker on each monitor. The interval is random and sporadic, sometimes with 30sec between flashes and sometimes multiple minutes. Both monitors are affected, though they do not flash at the same time. It seems that the flashing is likely related to PowerMizer, as the flash always occurs after a decrease in the PowerMizer performance level. (Not every performance level decrease results in a flash though.)

I have attached the output of nvidia-bug-report.sh.
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (303 KB)

Came here to report a similar problem. A single occasional flicker, seems the screen goes black and then flashes back. This is also a dual-monitor setup, (3rd monitor attached to the integrated gfx port). Fedora 25, GeForce GTX 750 Ti, driver version 384.47.

I can attach nvidia-bug-report.sh output when I figure out how to add attachments.
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (216 KB)

More testing indicates that this doesn’t seem to happen on my laptop with an NVS5400m and the integrated 1920x1080 display panel, so perhaps it only affects some combination of certain GPU generations, display bandwidth requirements, or number of displays.

I have the same flicker on F26 using single 4k DP monitor (384.47).
I’ve also seen the same flicker using the 381.xx branch, the issue isn’t present in the ‘long lived’ branch.
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (74.7 KB)

Hi All, Thanks for reporting this issue. Can you please provide below information :

  • What was the earlier driver without this issue?
  • What is the make/model of monitors you are using?
  • What desktop environment you are running? GNOME, KDE, else?
  • Please attach video to your existing post showing the issue.
  • Let us know if any specific reproduction steps for this issue.
  • Is the issue hit with single monitor? Do we need only Dual monitors to reproduce this issue?
  • Let us know if any custom setting done in monitor settings.

-Yes, 347.47 is the first driver where I have seen this issue.
-I have seen the issue on both Dell P2415Q (DisplayPort) and Dell U2212HM (DVI) monitors. I have not been able to reproduce the issue on my laptop with the integrated LVDS panel.
-KDE, with KF5 5.35 and Plasma 5.10.x with compositing turned on
-I will try to get a video of it later today, but I’m not sure a 30FPS camera will be able to pick it up since it is so fast.
-The issue seems to happen with PowerMizer reduces the GPU clock, so doing something to make the GPU clock increase and then waiting for it to decrease again helps to reproduce the issue. I see it rather often while just browsing the web with Chrome though.
-I initially saw the issue on a system with a GTX970 and dual Dell P2415Qs, but I later also reproduced it on a system with a GTX750 and a single Dell U2212HM. I have not been able to reproduce the issue on my laptop with an NVS5400M and the integrated panel.
-Nothing that should have any effect.

We are tracking this issue in Bug 200325074 .

Hi all, Please share your details as well as per comment #5

  1. 375.66 doesn’t seem to have the issue.
  2. iiyama B2888USHU (Single Stream not MST).
  3. Cinnamon DE.
  4. I will try and record the issue later.
  5. The issue is most apparent using firefox, thunderbird, all apps seem affected including the desktop window.
  6. single monitor setup.
  7. Using default settings.
  • What was the earlier driver without this issue?
    381.22

  • What is the make/model of monitors you are using?
    Two monitors, both are X-Star DP2710LED

  • What desktop environment you are running? GNOME, KDE, else?
    Vanilla Fedora 25, Gnome 3.22.2

  • Please attach video to your existing post showing the issue.
    It’s too intermittent to capture.

  • Let us know if any specific reproduction steps for this issue.
    So far, I haven’t noticed a pattern.

  • Is the issue hit with single monitor? Do we need only Dual monitors to reproduce this issue?
    Can’t say.

  • Let us know if any custom setting done in monitor settings.
    Nothing custom.

Hello all,

I faced the same issue. NVIDIA drivers version 381.22 had no such issue but this issue appeared after update to 384.47. I see random occasional flash/flickering on each of my monitors. I did not update any other software and hardware. I just updated 381.22 to 384.47 only. So I think this problem is caused by driver only.

However, I can provide more info about software/hardware I use everyday:

  • One video card: GeForce GTX 960.
  • Gentoo Linux, no DE, awesome WM, compton composer.
  • Two monitors connected to DisplayPort ports of my video card.
  • These monitors belong to one big screen, configured by XrandR.
  • My upper monitor: 1920x1080@60.00hz, DELL U2312HM.
  • My lower monitor: 1920x1200@59.95hz, DELL U2412M.

When using 384.47, the annoying flickering appears 30 or 40 times per hour on each of the monitors randomly. Right now I installed old driver 381.22 and I see no problems in this old version.

I have nVidia GeForce 980ti (Gigabyte) but see the same problem as one described above.

What was the earlier driver without this issue?
x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-381.22

  • What is the make/model of monitors you are using?
    Nec 225WXM

  • What desktop environment you are running? GNOME, KDE, else?
    Gentoo, KDE 5, Plasma 5.9.5

  • Please attach video to your existing post showing the issue.
    Unfortunately already rolled back to previous driver

  • Let us know if any specific reproduction steps for this issue.
    No specific steps. Flickering happens randomly with average interval of 1 minute.

  • Is the issue hit with single monitor? Do we need only Dual monitors to reproduce this issue?
    Issue happens on single monitor setup.

  • Let us know if any custom setting done in monitor settings.
    No custom settings, default X config done by driver itself.

Hi all, Nobody yet shared video of this random occasional flash/flickering. We have fixed this issue but want to confirm by checking video. Can someone please post video recording of this issue?

@sandipt, it’s difficult to capture a video unless you record for long hours because it is very random.
But from what I noticed, it mostly only happens at low GPU load.

That sounds about right. The bug fix Sandip referred to is for a glitch that happens when the GPU drops into its lowest power state. You can watch the PowerMizer page in nvidia-settings to see if the glitch is correlated with a drop to power level 0. If so, then this does sound like the same bug.

Upgraded to 384 yesterday and am experiencing the same issue. I have a GTX960, single monitor setup, using Ubuntu 16.04 with unity.

Every couple of minutes I get a black flicker, it’s completely random and doesn’t depend on what’s happening on the screen, could be typing, or gaming, idling or watching a video.

Sometimes the flicker is not full screen but containted to just one window.

Can you please try 384.59?

384.59 works properly, thanks!

Great! Hope issue fixed for all users.

I was having the issue before, and I haven’t seen the issue happen since upgrading to 384.59.