Getting graphics artifacting on my 7840HS laptop, even after a motherboard replacement. Is it a driver thing? - eviltoast

I’ve installed Pop!OS after getting my Lenovo Ideapad Pro 5 back from the warranty repair. Supposedly they changed the motherboard (which I don’t doubt, it was waiting a week for new parts apparently), but even after that I’m still getting graphical errors and bugs when moving between desktops and other window animations. I know X11 can be a bit buggy at best, so it could just be that on top of the newer SoC.

  • bruce965@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    10 months ago

    Could you describe the kind of glitches you are getting?

    As a first test (and only as a test) I would try holding space bar during boot, then pressing E while focusing the Pop!_OS option, and removing quiet and splash from the line on the bottom, then pressing enter to boot.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      10 months ago

      General memory-corruption artifacting, such as pink checker-boxes around elements that are animating on the desktop. Swapping from fullscreen games would sometimes lock the system with a white screen (visually) until I restarted GNOME.

      I’ve swapped over to KDE-Neon to see if Wayland might help, and it seems to have cleared up the artifacting but I can’t be sure until I test some games.

      There’s also a possibility that the System76 power daemon was causing issues. I noticed that artifacts disappear altogether if I’m running any kind of GPU test, and I’ve seen some suggest that the GPU was running at a too low frequency. Would make sense if the daemon was the cause as that’s the other big change between Pop and KDE-Neon.

      I’ll likely be back on Pop! when they bring out CosmicDE so I’ll try again then, but it might be that I avoid it for now.

      • bruce965@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        10 months ago

        I had the same issue (on Pop!_OS), and I fixed it by tweaking the boot options to change IOMMU settings for my GPU.

        I would try testing without the splash option, as that will change when/how GPU drivers are loaded and it might fix the glitches issue (but might still cause other issues).

        • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          10 months ago

          I’ll give that a go next time I check out Pop!OS :) Thanks!

          At least for now, KDE-Neon is running pretty stable. I’ll give a few 3D apps a go and get back to this thread if its good.

      • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        10 months ago

        I have the same chip in my mini PC (7840HS) and it works fine for me on Linux, but then again I use Arch + Wayland. Maybe you could try a couple of different distros on a Live USB or something (you could create one using Ventoy and then put a few different ISOs on there to play around with). I’d recommend choosing a distro with a recent kernel and updated graphics stack, for eg Arch or Bazzite and see how it goes.

        But the artefacts you describe sound more like a hardware glitch to me. Have you tried running the Lenovo hardware diagnostics from the system boot menu? (IIRC you need to press F12 or something to get the menu and then choose the diagnostics mode).

        • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          I ran the diagnostics and they all came up clean, which I mentioned to Lenovo (who were pretty chill with getting the mobo replaced).

          It seems to happen more when the graphics are clocked lower, or transitioning from high power state to lower power states. That being said, I’ve so far had it work pretty good on KDE-Neon on Wayland. Haven’t test X11 yet tho.