Video artifacts during boot

Ask Fedora
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1

I am encountering strange video artifacts during the boot process. It starts as a few flashing raster lines during Plymouth, progresses to the bottom third of the screen during gdm and login, and then completely disappears once the Gnome desktop is rendered. This didn’t happen with the nouveau drivers.

I have tried everything I could find online, related to trying to force NVidia driver to load earlier in the boot process. Perhaps ironically, that just made the problem worse, with the artifacts continuing in that case even after Gnome desktop loads.

This is with Fedora 43 Workstation with Wayland only (no X11), the latest akmod-nvidia-open driver from RPMFusion, a NVidia 3080 Ti GPU and a Gigabyte 4K monitor.

When early driver load isn’t messing more extensively with Gnome, I get similar artifacts if I set the screen refresh to 60 or 120 Hz. It is only happy at 59.94 or 119.88 (hope I got those numbers correct - going on memory here). This makes me think it is a problem with monitor settings or some kind of EDID issue that the NVidia driver has that the nouveau does not.

This is a brand new system and install. Thus I don’t have any data relating to Fedora 42 or earlier driver versions.

Any help or insight greatly appreciated.

2

To follow up to my own post, all problems went away by switching out the HDMI cable for a DP cable. The cable and connectors are good. It works fine at 4K 120 Hz and another HDMI cable showed identical results.

My uninformed opinion is there was some kind of issue with EDID/NVidia/Wayland not negotiating a valid refresh rate during the early boot process, which was properly negotiated once the system was fully booted into Gnome desktop.

So I think there is still an issue, but obviously I have a very satisfactory workaround.

3

are there any artifacts after its booted up?

in general nvidia is funky coinflip stuff, nouveau has less features but also less bugs since they are careful.
Nvidia is more like implement first fix later. so if you dont have issues while use its sadly normal.

(normal doesnt mean good but yea)