Bug 73116 - [R9 270x] Intermittent flickering of entire screen
Summary: [R9 270x] Intermittent flickering of entire screen
Status: RESOLVED MOVED
Alias: None
Product: xorg
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Driver/Radeon (show other bugs)
Version: git
Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64) Linux (All)
: high normal
Assignee: xf86-video-ati maintainers
QA Contact: Xorg Project Team
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2013-12-29 11:09 UTC by Ivan Bulatovic
Modified: 2019-11-19 07:43 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
i915 platform:
i915 features:


Attachments

Description Ivan Bulatovic 2013-12-29 11:09:25 UTC
From time to time I can notice the flickering (tilting) of entire screen. This happened on Windows also untill Catalyst beta9 driver came out. One of the fixes in the changelog was:

Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta9.5 Driver for Windows:

Resolves intermittent flickering seen on some AMD Radeon R9 270x graphics cards

Now this is fixed on Windows, but I have the same problem still on Linux (Arch Linux).

kernel: Linux silverstone 3.13.0-rc5-MAINLINE #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Dec 23 00:19:39 CET 2013 x86_64 GNU/Linux

glamor and xf86-video-ati are the latest git snapshots.

Could we contact Catalyst developers and get some more info on this. I don't see any log warnings (journalctl -b, xorg.log etc), but I can provide them if needed.

Thanks!
Comment 1 Marek Olšák 2014-01-02 18:08:16 UTC
Can you test the master branch of the Linux kernel? There are some new fixes.
Comment 2 Ivan Bulatovic 2014-01-02 18:34:10 UTC
Sure thing, but this will be hard to bisect (at least it would take a lot of time) because I can't reproduce it on my own.

I've done  a little research about this issue, it seems that this is caused by a bug in VBIOS:

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=440&threadid=169203

I have no intention of flashing my Sapphire Dual-X R9 270X with a BIOS from a site that doesn't belong to OEM of my card :)

I'll contact Sapphire about this also, but in the meantime I'll test with the current mainline, also itchy to test the performance with the latest drm code pushed.

Thank you Marek, I'll report back with some new info...
Comment 3 Marek Olšák 2014-01-02 18:57:59 UTC
I think I used to have the same problem as you, but it seems to be fixed now.
Comment 4 Ivan Bulatovic 2014-01-02 20:08:27 UTC
Running the latest mainline and this bug is not resolved, I still have flickering (watching youtube, starting an application like thunar) but it seems random and there is no particular trigger for it.
Comment 5 peter.garba 2016-07-12 11:19:54 UTC
It seems there is a problem with powersafe:

With auto:
echo auto > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level

you will see heavy screen flickering on higher display resolutions (2560 x 1440). It's ok with 1920x1200.

With low or high:
echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level or
echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level

there is no screen flickering with all display resolutions.

hardware:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Curacao XT / Trinidad XT [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270X/370X]

Kernel: mainline 4.7.0-rc7 

Drivers:
x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-7.7.0
media-libs/mesa-12.0.1 (with radeon and radeonsi enabled)
x11-base/xorg-server-1.18.3
Comment 6 Pekka Vuorela 2017-04-16 11:41:06 UTC
(In reply to peter.garba from comment #5)
> It seems there is a problem with powersafe:
> 
> With auto:
> echo auto > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
> 
> you will see heavy screen flickering on higher display resolutions (2560 x
> 1440). It's ok with 1920x1200.
> 
> With low or high:
> echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level or
> echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
> 
> there is no screen flickering with all display resolutions.

This. Was almost ready to throw R9 270x I bought out of the window as unusable until tested above.

Ubuntu 17.04, kernel 4.10.0, xserver-org-video-radeon/ati 7.9.0, mesa 17.0.3 etc.
Comment 7 zen18 2017-07-04 12:34:59 UTC
> It seems there is a problem with powersafe:
> 
> With auto:
> echo auto > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
> 
> you will see heavy screen flickering on higher display resolutions (2560 x
> 1440). It's ok with 1920x1200.
> 
> With low or high:
> echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level or
> echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
> 
> there is no screen flickering with all display resolutions.
> 
> hardware:
> 
> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
> Curacao XT / Trinidad XT [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270X/370X]
> 
> Kernel: mainline 4.7.0-rc7 
> 
> Drivers:
> x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-7.7.0
> media-libs/mesa-12.0.1 (with radeon and radeonsi enabled)
> x11-base/xorg-server-1.18.3

(In reply to peter.garba from comment #5)

Can confirm. Tho I have flickering even with 1920x1080.

    Linux 4.11.7-1-ARCH, 
    Vendor: X.Org (0x1002)
    Device: AMD TAHITI (DRM 2.49.0 / 4.11.7-1-ARCH, LLVM 4.0.1) (0x6798)
    Version: 17.1.4
    Accelerated: yes
    Video memory: 3072MB
    Unified memory: no
    Preferred profile: core (0x1)
    Max core profile version: 4.5
    Max compat profile version: 3.0
    Max GLES1 profile version: 1.1
    Max GLES[23] profile version: 3.1
    
    OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 17.1.4

    [     4.336] (II) Module radeon: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
    [     4.336] 	compiled for 1.19.3, module version = 7.9.0
Comment 8 Hadrien Lacour 2017-12-21 09:56:55 UTC
Hello, another one experiencing it here (nothing in Xorg.0.log or dmesg).

uname -a: Linux gentoo 4.14.8-gentoo #1 SMP Wed Dec 20 20:09:58 CET 2017 x86_64 AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
GPU: VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480] (rev e7)
Xorg: 1.19.5
Xorg.conf.d: default amdgpu settings
Mesa: 17.3

Setting /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level to high or low does fix it.
Comment 9 Hadrien Lacour 2018-01-07 10:55:01 UTC
It seems worthy to say that "high" does flicker too (it just seems more rare).
Comment 10 Hadrien Lacour 2018-01-07 10:55:26 UTC
It's worthy to say that "high" does flicker too, it just seems more rare.
Comment 11 Jan Vlug 2018-03-24 11:46:25 UTC
This issue seems to be manifest for a whole range of AMD Radeon GPUs under Gnome on Wayland after resume from suspend.

See: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105729
Comment 12 Martin Peres 2019-11-19 07:43:57 UTC
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/issues/87.


Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.