I wanted to do this post for a while now, but I have been caught up in my thesis. Today I handed in the digital version and am now waiting to hand in the physical copy.

Black Flickering

So, about a month ago, my screen started flickering. It was only the top third of the screen, and the flickers came in short bursts. Nonetheless, it was annoying.

See, I am running an NVIDIA graphics card. Big Mistake.
So I already knew what the cause of the problem was. Well, not exactly, but I knew the NVIDIA driver update was to blame. I searched around the internet a little and finally found a forum post. It seemed like an update that I just received — 530 — caused problems for many other NVIDIA graphics cards…

The fix was to add the parameter nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to your bootloader. I am running openSuse Tumbleweed, so I added the parameter to the variable GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub. After that, you need to rebuild the bootloader, so I ran sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.

Great — Problem Solved

Not.
It reduced the issue by about 50% tho.

I don’t know whether I did something wrong or this fix does not work for my model. But after a few days or weeks, I thought of another thing that might be the problem. GPU sag. Recently I saw a YouTube video by the hardware repair god Louis Rossman about GPU sag killing graphics cards. This reminded me of another video I saw ages ago — I think by Mutahar — about GPU sag causing black flickering. So I got my PC from under the table and looked inside it.

Bent GPU

Yeah, it’s definitely bending.

So my new hypothesis is that the update revealed a hardware problem that my graphics card was suffering from for a longer time. Another piece of evidence is that the bug seems to be connected to power. Somehow I came across this multiple times during my initial research into the bug. This forum post is one example.

To test my hypothesis, I put some of my favorite books under the graphics card for support.

Books GPU

You can clearly see that now it is not bending anymore. And the flickering got a lot better — but it’s still not completely gone. But this is not a sustainable solution. So I got something from Amazon.

Final GPU

As you can see, this is a much better solution and the card is even more straight. Now the flickering is almost completely gone. I have been sitting here for 20 minutes without a single flicker. Sometimes it flickers multiple times per minute tho.

The moral of the story is not to use an NVIDIA graphics card in your Linux setup. In the wise words of Linus Torvalds: NVIDIA, fuck you!

I need to get an AMD graphics card