Hi, I’ve read many complaints about flickering or distortions on the top or the whole of the display after installing the nvidia driver on optimus systems w/ external monitors (two in my case). I’ve searched many places, w/out success, for a description of the flickering that matches my particular issue so I decided to ask you guys if the issue detailed below is common and/or related to other complaints of flickering and whether there is a solution to it. I have my laptop display (4k) connected to two qhd external monitors with hybrid graphics enabled (system info below). Not sure how to begin addressing this.
When this issue happens:
On wayland or x11, this issue will usually happen after the computer has been put to sleep for a while (anywhere from a few minutes to overnight). If I put the computer to sleep and start it again immediately, it almost never happens though occasionally does.
Issue Description:
One or both of the external monitors will quickly or slowly switch (or flicker?) back and forth between one of two things: the desktop wallpaper or the contents of the other external display. For example, Display #2 will flash Display #3’s contents. It is more readily noticeable when i have an app open in one or both external displays though also if one of the external monitors is the primary desktop (shows the desktop’s top bar). It almost seems like the system is confused about which content belongs on which external monitor. The internal laptop display is not affected by this issue and the contents of the internal display do not show up on the external monitors (or vice versa) as far as I’ve observed.
Also, when I move my mouse to one of the external displays, the flickering will sometimes react to my mouse’s movements on the screen exposing some or all of what is supposed to show on that monitor as I move it around. It’s not always the same behavior. I can usually interact with the app even while something else is showing.
Things I’ve tried:
To stop this flickering, I have to reboot and make sure the computer does not sleep. Or, if I disable the integrated gpu (set Discrete only in bios), the issue seems to mostly go away though I think it happened once. Neither of these solutions are ideal for my use case.
Monitors:
- Laptop display (4k 60hz)
- Two Lenovo Thinkvision P27H-20 monitors connected via one thunderbolt-3 cable, monitors are daisy chained with DP cable, 60HZ
System:
- OS: Fedora Linux 38 (Workstation Edition) x86_64
- Host: 20MDCTO1WW ThinkPad P1
- Kernel: 6.4.15-200.fc38.x86_64
- DE: GNOME 44.4
- WM: Mutter
- WM Theme: Adwaita
- Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3]
- Icons: Adwaita [GTK2/3]
- Terminal: gnome-terminal
- CPU: Intel i7-8850H (12) @ 4.300GHz
- GPU: NVIDIA Quadro P2000 Mobile
- GPU: Intel CoffeeLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics 630]
- Memory: 6106MiB / 31503MiB
UEFI Setting:
- Hybrid Graphics
Nvidia Driver:
- Repo: RPM Fusion
- Version: 535.104.05
Grub settings:
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=“$(sed ‘s, release .*$,g’ /etc/system-release)”
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=“console”
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=“rhgb quiet rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1”
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY=“true”
GRUB_ENABLE_BLSCFG=true
SUSE_BTRFS_SNAPSHOT_BOOTING=“true”
Other settings:
- No environment variables added to /etc/environment
- No changes to default config of nvidia driver, nvidia system-services, or fedora system services