Arch Linux

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

NVidia drivers and flicker

I figure that this would be a good time to bring this up since I have a little bit of it.

At the moment I am using a patched NVidia 8178 driver for my FX5600 card; Patched so it would build against modern kernels. It was the last driver that NVidia released that doesn't introduce flicker on my card. That flicker is only on one of my monitors. Here's my problem: one of these days I'm going to have to upgrade to Xorg 7.1, It's inevitable. At that time my driver is toast and I really don't want to buy a new card; I'm waiting to afford to build a new computer. Is it possible to tweak the setting that I can stop the flickering? I ask because all of my setting for both monitors come from the manufacturer's documentation, and automatically aquiring them doesn't produce useful results.

paranoos

Member

From: thornhill.on.ca

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 442

Re: NVidia drivers and flicker

sounds like the nvidia driver is loading frequencies from your monitor, which you implied are incorrect. ("automatically aquiring them doesn't produce useful results")

disable nvidia's automatic loading by adding this line to your nvidia device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option "IgnoreEDID" "true"

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: NVidia drivers and flicker

sounds like the nvidia driver is loading frequencies from your monitor, which you implied are incorrect. ("automatically aquiring them doesn't produce useful results")

disable nvidia's automatic loading by adding this line to your nvidia device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option "IgnoreEDID" "true"

I've added that line before to no avail. The interesting thing is is that I've used basically the same xorg.conf file since I added my second monitor 8 months ago. I had to make some changes to pointer behavior since the Xorg 7.0 upgrade, but my monitor settings have never changed outside of trying what you've suggested. I have exactly the same flicker problem with Arch as I did before with Mandriva. Any driver later than the 8178 has this problem. I suppose since I'm going to be forced into change anyway, maybe I'll give it another go. I'm always reluctant; if anything is going to give me a huge headache it's going to be a NVidia driver issue.