I have a Lenovo Thinkpad P1 (2nd gen) with a Quadro T2000 mobile nvidia gpu, driver version 450.66. I’m connecting a DELL 2560x1440 external monitor via mDP and a Thunderbolt Thinkpad Lenovo docking station. The docking station is attached to my laptop via Lenovo’s proprietary thunderbolt system, I believe (it has the lightning symbol next to the port on the laptop and on the plug).
I’m running ubuntu 20.04 with kernel 5.4.0-48-generic.
xfce4.14 with 2x display scaling enabled.
Since upgrading to the driver version 450.51 (the newest version shipped in ubuntu 20.04’s repositories), every once in a while, I get static/white noise coming from the bottom of my external monitor. Sometimes it covers the entire screen, sometimes it moves up and down, flickers. It usually disappears if I change windows or click my mouse somewhere. Then it may come back again. It is very disruptive occasionally.
I tried
- manually installing the newer 450.66 driver, that didn’t help. (nvidia-smi and cuda work fine, even with the “older” apt packages).
- cannot find anything weird or relevant in dmesg/kern.log and x.log
- unchecking the “allow flipping” option in nvidia x server settings -> openGL settings
- checking the “force composition pipeline” option in nvidia x server settings -> X server Display Configuration -> advanced (read on some posts that this prevents screen tearing)
Note that I’m almost certain this must be a nvidia driver issue because the static only appears on the external monitor, NEVER on the actual laptop screen. There’s also no issues when I switch to the intel integrated graphics (but I can’t test those on the external monitor because Lenovo P1’s are somehow hardware configured such that external graphical output can only be handled by the nvidia GPU).
I’ve been googling this regularly for the last two weeks and can’t find anything. I’m happy to provide further info of course, and am attaching a picture (which I had to take with my phone, as a screenshot of the screen does not show the static at all !)