Color banding and animation issues with 520.56.06

After switching from the 515.49.19 vulkan beta to 520.56.06, I started seeing some odd color banding any time a blur effect was applied. It almost looks like it’s 8-bit color instead of 24-bit, but only on certain parts of the screen. It also happened on the SDDM login screen but only when the blur effect was applied. When there was no blur it looked fine. The interesting thing is that I have four monitors, and I was only seeing this happen on two of them.

Also the new driver seemed to break certain window animations. For example, the burn-my-windows animations would continue showing the full window while the animation was running, and then when the animation finished the window would disappear.

All these issues went away when I reverted back to the 515 series vulkan beta.

I am on Arch with kernel 6.02, plasma 5.26.1, and RTX 3080 Ti. Another user in the Arch forum has reported the same issue.

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I also experience this issue. I have two same 240hz screens, both connected via DP. It only happens on one of them. It appears to get progressively worse the higher refresh rate I set.
I have a 3080 with the 520 drivers.
This doesn’t happen with nouveau.
I’m gonna try to downgrade later today and will report whether it helps.

I can confirm that downgrading to 515.76-1 works.

This turned out to be the final straw for me. I saw an AMD 6950xt on sale this morning for $800 and pulled the trigger, will be selling my 3080 Ti to break even. I got tired of all the issues with the nvidia driver… this bug, being stuck at the highest power level for a whole year until a fix came out, poor VR support, wayland still not working properly, high gpu usage on idle desktop, etc. So best of luck, but I will not be available to test any fixes for this issue.

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Can someone affected by this problem please try opening nvidia-settings, navigating to the page for the affected display device, opening the “Controls” tab and checking the dithering settings? Please also try changing the “depth” setting from Auto to 8bpc and/or changing the Mode setting.

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I am back on the 515 series driver, but I will say that I have the Dithering control set to Disabled on all monitors, which also disables the Mode and Depth settings. It doesn’t look like the entire screen is using a low color mode, just certain areas like transparent konsole windows with the blur effect enabled, sometimes the shadows under windows, and window title bar gradients. The rest of the screen looks like full color. Sometimes these areas render correctly for a few seconds first and then switch to the low color look. In SDDM, it looks fine until the blur effect kicks in and then looks like low color mode while blurred. So I don’t think it’s a signalling issue, seems more like it has something to do with blur or transparency effects rendering incorrectly.

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Good for you. I also plan getting a new AMD GPU ASAP. Still gonna have to live a few months with my Nvidia

EDIT: perfect, now I cannot answer to aplattner, cause I have reached the reply limit. Here’s the answer:

Gonna upgrade back to 520 today and will try. But iirc I’ve tried it with no success.

Changing the settings doesn’t do much. Even worse on darker colors. My driver version with problem is
520.56.06

Images with the problem Dropbox - Zrzut ekranu z 2022-10-20 17-09-24.png - Simplify your life

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The picture from my camera to show what is wrong Dropbox - IMG_20221020_172822.jpg - Simplify your life

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I also have this color banding issue with the newest nvidia driver on my Dell Monitor connected via Display Port.
Im using Manjaro LTS Kernel 5.15.

Here is my Topic from Manjaro Forum, that i created 5 days ago… with additional informations about my system and so on:

https://forum.manjaro.org/t/nvidia-dithering-mode-no-longer-working-after-the-nvidia-5-20-driver-update-from-today-release/124494

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I also changed the differend dither modes, but no success.
https://forum.manjaro.org/uploads/default/original/3X/9/3/937268fb73fe05b48a508454b6b9b1fd488c015d.jpeg

Im not played with the depth setting yet… i rolled my system back to the old Kernel and hope nvidia will fix this horrible bug soon :(

Same issue here, I’ll wait for a fix :)

Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma 5.25.5
Kernel 6.0.2-2 (same issue with 5.19.16-2)
X11
RTX 2080 with 520.56.06 driver
G-SYNC compatible 240 Hz monitor using DP (no issue with another 60 Hz monitor without G-SYNC using HDMI)

I have the same problem :(. Please, fix it is horrible.

Latest driver 525.60.11 with kernel 6.0.11-1 didn’t change anything :(
Playing with depth (auto / 6 / 8) didn’t solved this issue for me.

@aplattner if you need more information like logs or anything else please tell us!

@gnoumph
I tried reproducing issue locally on below configuration setup with on GNOME and SDDM desktop environment but could not observed banding and animation issues so far.

OMEN by HP 25L Gaming Desktop GT15-0xxx + Ubuntu 19.10 + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 + Driver 520.56.06 + GBT AORUS FI27Q-P + DELL G3223D

Both display resolution is set as 2560 x 1440 and refresh rate as 165 Hz and connected via DP cable.
Can you please help us to share application or any file where you are observing issue and share repro video for more clarity.

Hi, thanks for your answer!

I tried to make a video and take pictures of the problem, but my phone doesn’t have a good quality camera and it’s hard to see the difference depending on the refresh rate.
So I’ll try to describe the problem instead.

Before the problem, my monitor was running at 240 Hz, but after updating to the 520.56.06 driver, I thought there was a configuration problem because the image seemed to lack color, as if I were in 16-bit or less.
Note that the problem is not so obvious on light colors, it is especially the dark parts on which the gradients are particularly visible. A bit like a video of old game, like Tomb Raider V - Cinématique 21 - La base russe - YouTube.
The problem seems to be directly related to the refresh rate, because the higher it is, the more the image is degraded.

This makes me use my screen at 60 Hz although it is capable of going to 240, which is a bit of a shame…

Here is my setup (see my previous post for previous software versions) :

  • Manjaro Linux 22.0.0
  • KDE Plasma 5.26.4
  • Kernel 6.0.11-1 (same issue with 5.19.16-2)
  • X11
  • RTX 2080 with 525.60.11 driver
  • G-SYNC compatible 240 Hz monitor (Samsung LC27RG50) using DP (no issue with another 60 Hz monitor (a simple ASUS) without G-SYNC using HDMI). Both are 1920x1080.

Do you need logs, or other information?

Thanks!

Same Problem here.

Display Setup:

  • (Primary) 144Hz Acer VG270UP 1440p Monitor connected via DP
  • 144hz LG 24GL600F 1080p Monitor connected via DP
  • 144Hz LG 24GL600F 1080p Monitor connected via HDMI

Desktop Setups (I changed Distro and GPU because of this bug, however it didn’t went away):

  • Manjaro Linux
  • Desktop Environment: KDE
  • X11
  • RTX 1070 with 520.56.06
  • RTX 3070 with 520.56.06

What happens?:
One of the screens (LG 24GL600F connected via DP (should be DP-0)) has a “texture” looking effect (moving squares).

Changing only the Bit-Depth solves this issue, however it leads to color banding (videos look like someone has redrawn them with less colors).

Changing only the Dithering Mode removes the moving squares, however it leads to other effects, like a high pitched noise effect.

Here is a video of the “square” effect (hopefully upload worked):

The last drivers without this issue was the entire 515.xx.xx versions.

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For better representation and for better reproduction I made a new video.

OS: Manjaro KDE X11 Liveboot with the KDE ISO Image from github .com/manjaro/release-review/releases/tag/202212010641 (can only post one link) on Ventoy
GPU: RTX 3070

The Live Environment contains the 520.56.06 NVIDIA Driver (Propriatary Drivers are selectable in a Menu on Boot).

The new Video can be downloaded from Google Drive - 263MB - 1 min

Some explanation to the Video:

  1. Already mentioned square effects can be seen close up at 00:02
  2. Disabling Dithering removes that effect (00:08), however now color banding is very visible (00:10)
  3. Re-Enabling Dithering (00:15) removes the color banding (00:16), however now the square effect is back (00:18)
  4. Setting the Dithering Mode to “Static 2x2” (00:22) results in a different square effect animation pattern (00:24)
  5. Setting the Dithering Mode to “Temporal” (00:29) results in noisy looking effect (00:30)
  6. Setting the Bit-Depth of the Dithering Control to 8bpc (00:38) results in Color Banding (00:41) without weird effects. (Almost looks like that this disables Dithering in 2.)
  7. Re-Setting the Bit-Depth of the Dithering Control to 6bpc (00:51) removes the Color Banding, however now the square effects are back (00:55)

It is important to mention, that this problem only happens on one monitor (which is pretty weird), with NVIDIA Drivers >= 520.56.06.

My uneducated guess is, that there is some kind of Dithering Bit-Depth mismatch, as I guess the Dithering process expects some kind of Color Format to properly dither the frames.

What other people are somehow seeing is that the Dithering Process seems to be either disabled, or more likely set to the wrong Dither Bit-Depth (see 6.)

I have the issue on my PC with a 2080ti + Dell S2417DG (Display Port connected) + Manjaro KDE 5.15 LTSC Kernel (X11) and since the 520.XX.XX driver release, the older drivers has no problems.

The colourbanding issue is always there with my Monitor and i always used Temporal Dither Filter to solve that problem but i dont had to reduce to colour range to 6 Bit… so its only a work around at the moment and should be adressed with higher Priority, its around 2month now since this issue is there.

I confirm that using the same settings as you do solves the problem, thanks for that!

  • Screen resolution: 1920x1080 @240Hz
  • Dithering: Enabled
  • Mode: Temporal
  • Depth: 6bpc