I have been a happy Fedora user for the last three or four years. I really appreciate the work the community is doing in giving non-tech people like me viable alternatives to (the currently rather crappy) Windows OS.
This is my first post because I have recently started experiencing an issue where graphical glitches occur for a split-second. The isssue started occuring after I changed my former RX 6800XT for the newer RX 9070XT.
The glitch happens intermittently and I am not able to reproduce the issue reliably. It happens both while doing light office work using OnlyOffice and LibreWolf and while gaming. What normally happens is that there appears to be a glitchy area of pixels in the lower part of the screen. To me as a lay-person it looks like gnome switches between other open windows and then back again. It’s almost like part of a different window is flashed on screen and then disappears again. I don’t know how else to describe it.
Additionally, what also happens far fewer times is that the whole display becomes black and then show the image again after around a second. This only happens whenever the image is static and nothing much is going on.
So far, I have updated the mesa drivers and done regular updates. But nothing seems to be helping. The issues is not so severe that it becomes impossible to do work on the device, but I would like to rule out a hardware issue. Fedora had no trouble recognizing the card and the motherboard self-check does not throw up any errors, either. There were no crashes at all, except for one time when the system froze up while watching YouTube. I had to soft-reset the PC that time. Other than that, no issues, no performance drops, nothing unusual.
I am a relative beginner and only able to perform basic terminal commands. Do you have any ideas what the issue might be? Let me know what kind of additional information I can provide in order to trouble-shoot the issue.
Thanks in advance! I am happy to be part of the Linux community now!
@theprosperer: In addition to the original F43 Workstation (Gnome) installer USB, you can try respin installers or F44 beta installers which may reveal that the issue has been fixed. Such experiments are easily and quickly done using https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html. Ventoy allows you to have a collection of installer ISO’s on one USB key and choose the one you want to boot.
Thanks, I will try out the methods suggested! I will let you know how it turns out.
Maybe it’s worth mentioning that I originally installed F42 last year with the old card, then upgraded to F43 and changed the RX 6800XT for the RX 9070XT a couple of months ago.
I did check if the cables are seated correctly, and they are. Also, I didn’t notice any obvious physical damage on the displayport cable or plugs.
Okay, so I tested out Ventoy and Fedora KDE and I wasn’t able to reproduce the issue there.
Could you help me figure out if my AMD GPU drivers are up to date and if the right set of drivers is selected. I would like to find out if anything might have gone wrong while upgrading from F42 to F43 and when I switched the AMD cards. Maybe reinstall the drivers…?
I am not sure and would like to hear your two cents.
Ultimately, it could be Wayland compositing especially concerning WINE with the little window pop-ups. I experienced the WINE window pop-up thing in another distro while gaming before. The screen blanking has something to do with compositing and refresh of the screen most likely which I’ve also encountered in other distros. Funny enough, it was Gnome in the other distros I was using when encountering the previously discussed issues.
Currently (F43) I’ve not experienced either problem (mentioned above) but I have had weird artifacts appear on screen when starting a game and sometimes surfing youTube. I really don’t think that it is graphics drivers as my card is NVidia based with Intel iGPU as well.
Gnome Wayland compositing is getting much better as time goes on but still seems to have a rough patch here and there at times.
That’s my 2 cents. There might be optimization workarounds floating about out on the web but regardless you’ve my best wishes bringing your system up to your desired level of operation.
So your hardware is probably OK, but you haven’t mentioned the Fedora KDE version you tested, so don’t know if the problem is associated with older or newer Fedora versions or Gnome. You may want to try newer KDE and Gnome Live USB’s.
You can create a new “test” user login to see if the issue occurs with current user default configuration or is something in settings for your login.
Ah, yes, good point. I did the testing with the latest version of Fedora 43 KDE and I used the standard settings of the live USB session. I did not change anything except uBlock origin in Firefox to block the annoying ads.
Strangely enough, I haven’t noticed the glitching in my daily-run workstation Fedora since I did the testing. Weird…
Regarding the comment about this being a Wayland issue, that might be the case. The strange thing is that the issue only appeared once I switched my RX 6800XT for the newer RX 9070XT. With the old card, this issue never popped up and I could leave the display on showing a static image or with nothing much going on for longer periods of time. It never blanked (or rather blacked) out for an instant.
Anyways, I will be keeping an eye on it. Thanks for the help and the amazing support from you guys!