Screen flickering on fedora 39

I was going to reply to this post:

but it’s closed already. I saw something in that post about the flickering being fixed int he 540 driver but I’m running the 545.29.06 driver and having a bunch of flickering.

My machine is a Lenovo p16 gen 2 with the nVidia RTX 3500:

lspci | grep -i nvidia
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation AD104GLM [RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU] (rev a1)

It’s a fresh install of fedora 39 as the laptop is brand new. I had issues on other lenovo laptops with nVidia graphics using the nouveau driver so figured I would install the nVidia driver and eliminate those issues and hopefully have better graphics.

I followed the directions for installing the nVidia driver here:

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

which was basically:

dnf install akmod-nvidia.x86_64

In addition to screen flickering the other odd thing I noticed, which I don’t remember seeing with the nouveau driver, it backspacing of characters and retyping as I’m entering text into an edit field. My guess is that the app is not doing this but it’s a side effect of some code invalidating regions on the graphics display. It’s weird. As I’m typing I see characters that I have already typed and which are displayed in the edit field disappear and then reappear. I mention this not only because I think it’s due to the graphics driver, but it could be the same issue as the flickering as flickering could be due to invalidating regions which should not be invalidated and thus you see the repaint. In fact you probably see the background get painted with the background color and then the region being painted by the app, which will cause flickering.

I’m also wondering whether there is a more stable older driver that I can downgrade to. And if so, what the downgrade instructions are.

Edit:

I guess I should add that most of the time my laptop display is closed and I’m connected to a secondary monitor. However, I do see screen flickering when only using my laptop monitor. The display resolution of the laptop monitor is 3840 x 2400. I don’t see any way to change the resolution so I’ve used the scaling. Got it set to 200% so that I can read the text. I had it set to 100% when using the second monitor just in case having multiple monitors with different scaling was causing an issue.

Edit 2:

I also purchased a new lenovo 14s and did a fresh install of fedora 39. It’s got an nVidia A500 graphics GPU:

lspci | grep -i nvidia
03:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA107GLM [RTX A500 Laptop GPU] (rev a1)

and using the same nVidia driver version:

modinfo -F version nvidia
545.29.06

However, there is no flickering issue on the lenovo 14s.

Thanks!

Hello , I’m having the same issue too…

*** Update ***

I just upgraded from fedora 39 to fedora 40 and the screen flickering seems to be resolved. I have no idea what resolved it, whether some update on the fedora side or whether the fedora update installed new NVidia software. It might be a bit too early to tell, but I’m not seeing the characters display and then get erased and then displayed again and that happened just about all the time so I’m pretty sure the issue has been fixed with the upgrade.

Edit:

Just reread my original post. I think that machine was one that I ended up returning due to this flickering problem. I wanted a backup for my lenovo thinkpad p53. So this update is for the flickering problem but when I originally posted it was referring to the p16 gen 2. At that time I hadn’t installed the NVidia drivers on this p53. Once I did, which was probably 6 months or so ago, I had the flickering problem and have been dealing with it since then, until last night when I upgraded to fedora 40.

Here is the version of the NVIdia driver after the upgrade to fedora 40. Not sure what it was before the upgrade.

modinfo -F version nvidia
555.58.02