NVIDIA GTX760 flickering

kellpossible · 2017-08-07 12:28:14

Hi ArchLinux forum, long time reading, first time posting,

A couple of months ago, I noticed my lightdm install flickering, a full-screen stippled on/off rapidly kind of flicker. As I moved the mouse around eventually the flicker would stop. It didn't really affect my use of the computer so I let it slide. Then, a couple of days ago, after being away for a month, I did a system upgrade (pacman -Syu), and all of a sudden the flickering became apparent in xfce, with no way to stop it. The flickering seems to stop temporarily while moving elements on the screen.

I tried a number of different window managers and display managers, all to no avail. (i3, gnome, gdm, etc ,etc). The same problem remained.

I then stayed up the entire night and reinstalled archlinux, fresh start, still same problem with a basic gnome install and starting from the terminal with startx and the Xorg .xinitrc config outlined on the wiki.

I then tried installing the linux-lts kernel and the nvidia-lts version to match, still same problem. Nothing obvious in the Xorg log or the journalctl.

So, it appeared that it could well be a strange hardware problem. Then, someone I know, suggested that I try booting ubuntu from a usb stick to see if the problem remains.

It turns out ubuntu runs perfectly. I really don't want to leave arch-linux after using it for almost 5 years now and having very few problems, but I just can't seem to figure out how to solve this one. I'm going to give one more effort tomorrow and try reinstalling my old gtx 570 graphics card to see if the problem remains, then probably give up. I work as a software engineer during the day, and have spent almost two days on this, and it's driving me insane to deal with this kind of problem at home when want to relax :'(

Any ideas? How can I try and diagnose this better? I've been trawling these forums and the nvidia forums for ideas, but nobody appears to be suffering the same problem. My suspicion is, that if it isn't a hardware problem, it's some bug with the nvidia driver, or the kernel or something?

I'm running an i5-2400k and an nvidia gtx760 and an asus motherboard. Would have thought that would be a fairly common setup (many people running similar), that the same problem would have cropped up for others?

Cheers

Last edited by kellpossible (2017-08-07 12:30:16)

seth · 2017-08-07 13:02:13

Try downgrading the driver to 381.22-8 and, since you've been "long time reading", you of course know that you're required to provide actual logs, version numbers etc. :-P

kellpossible · 2017-08-07 13:27:14

yeah sorry my bad, a little tricky having an epilepsy inducing gui to upload the logs from my pc, will copy them to usb from the terminal instead and upload them on my laptop!
currently attempting to downgrade too, but running into issues there too, xorg failing to start etc etc

kellpossible · 2017-08-07 13:36:17

wooo! well it seems that a downgrade of nvidia to 381 fixed it in the end. finally got it to work using the nice downgrade script from the aur. Thanks for the suggestion

seth · 2017-08-07 13:56:10

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Do … g_packages
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Li … in_clients

The 384.59 driver has worse issues - notably vdpau causes kernel halts.
Ensure to *only* downgrade the nvidia driver (nvidia, nvidia-utils, nvidia-settings) to the forementioned version. If that alone fixes it for you, report the bug to the arch bugtracker. It might be required to skip this driver version.

kellpossible · 2017-08-08 07:21:10

seth wrote:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Do … g_packages
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Li … in_clients
The 384.59 driver has worse issues - notably vdpau causes kernel halts.
Ensure to *only* downgrade the nvidia driver (nvidia, nvidia-utils, nvidia-settings) to the forementioned version. If that alone fixes it for you, report the bug to the arch bugtracker. It might be required to skip this driver version.

Ah cheers, a command line pastebin client would be handy for next time. Yep, I only have those packages downgraded, and it appears to be working just fine now. I'll post a bug report when I get home. Guess it's an upstream issue worth attempting to report to NVIDIA or Linux too?

seth · 2017-08-08 10:58:22

nvidia - looks like this https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi … 0-gtx-760/
Edit: or this one: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi … t-4k-60hz/

Last edited by seth (2017-08-08 10:59:44)

Arch Linux

#1 2017-08-07 12:28:14

NVIDIA GTX760 flickering

#2 2017-08-07 13:02:13

Re: NVIDIA GTX760 flickering

#3 2017-08-07 13:27:14

Re: NVIDIA GTX760 flickering

#4 2017-08-07 13:36:17

Re: NVIDIA GTX760 flickering

#5 2017-08-07 13:56:10

Re: NVIDIA GTX760 flickering

#6 2017-08-08 07:21:10

Re: NVIDIA GTX760 flickering

#7 2017-08-08 10:58:22

Re: NVIDIA GTX760 flickering

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