Arch Linux

O239

Member

Registered: 2024-03-01

Posts: 6

[SOLVED] Random horizontal strips of visual artifacts with an AMD GPU

I recently got a new laptop with integrated AMD graphics (780M), and started noticing random visial artifacts/glitches on the screen. They look like a horizontal strip of random colored pixel noise that lasts for about a frame or two. The strip usually has the height of about 15-20% of the screen. This happens somewhat more frequently while watching videos (especially when starting them), but it doesn't seem to be directly tied to any specific action.

Not sure if related, but I also saw a much weirder graphical bug twice - once on the first login into Plasma after installing Arch, and another one during normal usage. The screen went fully black, but moving the cursor "painted" the content back to it. The entire horizontal rows of pixels touching the cursor were painted as I moved it around. After I moved the cursor fully up and down (to "pain" the entire screen) everything seemed to return to normal.

Can't find a reliable way to reproduce this so can't really make a useful bug report for KWin/Mesa. Journal is also silent when this happens. But maybe some here had similar issues and/or can help me debug this, thanks in advance.

Additional details:
- The system is freshly installed and all packages (mesa, kwin, etc.) are up to date.
- I use the Wayland Plasma session.
- The refresh rate of the screen is 120 Hz, and the scaling is set to 200% (2880x1800 native resolution).
- The same random-noisy-strip glitch happened on a Fedora 40 KDE Live CD during initial laptop testing. So this is not Arch-specific, and happens at least on Plasma 6.0 as well as 6.1.

Last edited by O239 (2024-06-24 19:00:52)

O239

Member

Registered: 2024-03-01

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Random horizontal strips of visual artifacts with an AMD GPU

After some more digging I found a Mesa bug report of this issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11216

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 61,635

Re: [SOLVED] Random horizontal strips of visual artifacts with an AMD GPU

The refresh rate of the screen is 120 Hz, and the scaling is set to 200% (2880x1800 native resolution).

What if you instead lower the resolution to 1440x900 or reduce the refresh rate to 60Hz?
If sounds a bit like the signal is too much - the upstream bug has a phoen recording of the artifact, does it also show up in screen recordings (ie. is it the render or the monitor)?

Maybe also related to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU … _using_KDE

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O239

Member

Registered: 2024-03-01

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Random horizontal strips of visual artifacts with an AMD GPU

does it also show up in screen recordings

I wasn't able to capture it. But now that I think about it - I wasn't recording at 120 FPS, so it could've just slipped in between the frames.

Setting the refresh rate to 60 Hz doesn't help, and having everything be blurry at 900p will probably be worse than seeing these artifacts
But I'll try the

amdgpu.sg_display=0

parameter, thanks.

O239

Member

Registered: 2024-03-01

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Random horizontal strips of visual artifacts with an AMD GPU

The

amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x10

kernel parameter (which disables Panel Self Refresh) seems to have worked for me.

Also, there's another existing bug report for this issue (this time for the amdgpu driver): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3388