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Flickering

K

Kero_1116

Weaksauce
Joined
May 5, 2007
Messages
75
I am currently having an issue with flickering. See video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1px9mT5dRw

This happens very often.

I was using the 15.7 and 15.7.1 catalyst drivers and still causing this issue. I am currently using triple monitor setup. Each monitor is using resolution of 2048x1152.

My Video card is Sapphire R9 290 Edition 1000MHZ 4G GDDR5 5200MHZ 512BIT PCI-E Dual DVI-D/HDMI/DP TRI-X Video Card

I am using Windows 10

Anyone have a fix for this?

It fixes itself when I restart the computer but it appears back after a bit.
 
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I've got the same issue on my 260x and I've submitted a bug report for it already (please do the same so it gets a little more priority).
Not really a fix but I've found that
a) Launching a game stops the flicker (for the life of the game at least)
b) Turning a monitor off and then back on will stop the flicker
c) Disabling hardware accelerated flash stops the flicker from kicking in a lot

Hope that helps a bit. Also how are your monitors connected? I've got 1 DVI and 1 displayport and was thinking the flicker might be related to mixing display types.
 
Darakian said:
I've got the same issue on my 260x and I've submitted a bug report for it already (please do the same so it gets a little more priority).
Not really a fix but I've found that
a) Launching a game stops the flicker (for the life of the game at least)
b) Turning a monitor off and then back on will stop the flicker
c) Disabling hardware accelerated flash stops the flicker from kicking in a lot

Hope that helps a bit. Also how are your monitors connected? I've got 1 DVI and 1 displayport and was thinking the flicker might be related to mixing display types.
Click to expand...
Thank you. Let's keep each other posted here. I am going to post in their support forum also.

My monitors are connected via 2 DVI ports and the displayport. The display port monitor has an active convertor from DVI to displayport
 
Glad to help. As I recall GCN radeon cards have different timing engines for displayport and everything else. My guess is that the flicker is related to those clocks going out of sync, so hopefully this is an easy fix for AMD.

If you're up for it could you test the two DVI monitors without the displayport?
 
I believe this is related to how the memory clocks jump between idle and load speeds. I see the issue as well, and it had me thinking that my card was defective - but it runs every game fine with no crashes or artifacts at all. For me, the problem is only at desktop or in a web browser type situation. Its very random though, sometimes I wont see it for hours and then I will see 5 of those flickers in a minute. My monitor is connected through DP.

From what I can tell, its the memory speed jumps that seemed to coincide with the flickers, as logged in Afterburner/GPUz. I saw a discussion about this on another forum, I don't remember where, but I've found two potential solutions:

If I use Afterburner's unofficial overclocking mode with powerplay disabled, the card will not downclock at all. In Asus GPUTweak 2d clocks can be set manually, but I found that any increase in memory speeds resulted in memory ramping up to full speed anyways.

Either of these solutions should prevent the horizontal flickers, just depends on how you want the clock profile to be.

I've heard some cards come with a higher base speed on the RAM that prevents the issue but I'm not sure about this, I just know that my 290x does 150mhz on the ram at idle and the issue is present. I don't know if a driver fix or a bios update would be required to change the idle clocks, but until that happens the only solution seems to be manual adjustment with software.
 
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I have Sapphire R290X (reference) in Crossfire, started happening on my machine a few weeks ago. Was running 15.6 beta flawlessly then my desktop started randomly artifacting. Would occur sometimes right upon login to Windows, other times are 5-10 minutes. More like horizontal artifacts every couple seconds.

Was running Windows 8.1 at the time. Upgraded to Windows 10 last week hoping it'd fix the issue, exact same issue however with the new 15.7 drivers. Tried 15.15 as well. Un-installed with DDU, no dice. Hard to tell, but here's a pic I took that kinda shows it:

kquA2Og.jpg


If I uninstall the drivers, artifacts go away. If I unplug the displayport monitor (I run in eyefinity), artifacts go away. If I game, no artifacts at all. Currently have an open RMA I was going to box up tonight, starting to wonder if I should follow through? Warranty ends in a few months...
 
I think you should send it off....sounds like the problem will get worse. Just the fact that once you load the driver, its starts with the issues...well its kinda how my last rma was. with no driver it was fine...my new card is working great. Definitely would not wait till warrenty runs out and maybe count yourself lucky it happened during the warranty period as shitty as it is to send it off. btw if you loaded like a basic blue win 7 wallpaper it might be easier to gauge the picture.

Horizontal artifacts sound like vram is dieing to me
http://i60.tinypic.com/264s26p.png is what mine was doing
 
The stuff I'm seeing is nigh impossible to capture in a still shot (unless you pick out a frame from a video of course). Its just a frame-or-two of a bar just a few pixels high going across the screen - very fast and sometimes hard to see if you're looking at a different area of the screen.

I haven't seen much of these in the past few days, but when I do it seems linked to when the ram speed jumps between idle and load as indicated in Afterburner's logging graph. If I manually set the ram speed to not downclock it will stop the flickers dead in their tracks, but I haven't left the speed set like that for any length of time to know for sure if that is a permanent fix.

If I game for 6 hours straight it runs fine, which is why I think its not defective ram in this case but rather to how the clocks jump (and perhaps desync from the DP/DVI output controller?). No BSODs, no TDRs, no game crashing. Its really strange. I've got plenty of time left on my warranty, so no hurry to RMA something that can be fixed in software. Maybe I'll drop Gigabyte an email and see what they think about the issue.
 
that sounds a lot like the same flicker bug 280's get....i didn't think the 290s got them. You're not by chance using chrome when it happens? I even have hardware disabled and still get about one per week:mad:
 
primetime said:
that sounds a lot like the same flicker bug 280's get....i didn't think the 290s got them. You're not by chance using chrome when it happens? I even have hardware disabled and still get about one per week:mad:
Click to expand...

Yep I have Chrome running pretty much all the time. I had an issue with flash hardware acceleration causing BSODs a while back, but nothing recent so I have it enabled. I've also tried tweaking with the aux voltage but that didn't seem to make much difference compared to locking the clocks.
 
For what its worth... alot of times i have gpu-z running when it happens and one thing i believe i usually see is the graph indicating clock speed changes (power play?) around the time it occurs. Its like seeing a spike on the graph which could have been when it happens. Hard to be sure cause it always catches me by surprise and by the time i look at the graph 10 seconds have gone by. Lastly it makes no sense that its even possible with hardware disabled. Could just be some kind of Chrome bug that only effects amd cards....thankfully its a pretty minor flicker that only happens about once per week. I will turn hardware back on to see what if any effect it has with 15.7.1
 
Just had win10 pop up that I had a driver update available this morning.
15.20.some junk to 15.20.some other junk (didn't actually take note of versions)
It's installed and I'll report back on changes.

On another note, firefox updated recently and changed the nature of the bug. I don't have screen tearing any more, but for lack of a better term firefox would flip its' shit quite a lot.

Edit:
It's better, but still annoying. That plus some other win 10 annoyances has me back on 8.1 with an older driver now.
 
Last edited:
Well, I hope you guys are able to resolve it. The last time I had that kind of issue was on a 6770 and I had to permanently set my ram clocks to 1200 Mhz. However, so far, I have not experienced the issue at all on my R 9 290 since I bought it in November, 2013. I have gone from a 50 inch tv through HDMI t, then 2 x 27 inch 1080p monitors through DVI both, now I am on a 4k monitor through the display port.

However, I have never had sleep mode work correctly so I gave up on that. I am using an R9 290 Reference card if that helps.
 
Darakian said:
Just had win10 pop up that I had a driver update available this morning.
15.20.some junk to 15.20.some other junk (didn't actually take note of versions)
It's installed and I'll report back on changes.

On another note, firefox updated recently and changed the nature of the bug. I don't have screen tearing any more, but for lack of a better term firefox would flip its' shit quite a lot.

Edit:
It's better, but still annoying. That plus some other win 10 annoyances has me back on 8.1 with an older driver now.
Click to expand...
I think the update to firefox fixed this issue for me!
 
Darakian said:
Just had win10 pop up that I had a driver update available this morning.
15.20.some junk to 15.20.some other junk (didn't actually take note of versions)
It's installed and I'll report back on changes.

On another note, firefox updated recently and changed the nature of the bug. I don't have screen tearing any more, but for lack of a better term firefox would flip its' shit quite a lot.

Edit:
It's better, but still annoying. That plus some other win 10 annoyances has me back on 8.1 with an older driver now.
Click to expand...

Kero_1116 said:
I think the update to firefox fixed this issue for me!
Click to expand...
Never mind, spoke too soon. Stilll the same issue.
 
Kero_1116 said:
Never mind, spoke too soon. Stilll the same issue.
Click to expand...

Is it the exact same or did the update alter the issue at all? Before I reverted it morphed into a different issue (firefox draws seemed to blank out).
 
heck i turned hardware back on after last driver.....and knock on wood but no flickers so far. (did i mention hardware turned on? lol) ill probably get a flicker right after i post this lol right now current drivers and win 10 is looking good
 
New beta driver 15.8 is out. Anyone got a chance to try it to see if it fixes our flickering issue?

I am going to try it and see if it fixes the flickering issue when I get home
 
haz_mat said:
I believe this is related to how the memory clocks jump between idle and load speeds. I see the issue as well, and it had me thinking that my card was defective - but it runs every game fine with no crashes or artifacts at all. For me, the problem is only at desktop or in a web browser type situation. Its very random though, sometimes I wont see it for hours and then I will see 5 of those flickers in a minute. My monitor is connected through DP.

From what I can tell, its the memory speed jumps that seemed to coincide with the flickers, as logged in Afterburner/GPUz. I saw a discussion about this on another forum, I don't remember where, but I've found two potential solutions:

If I use Afterburner's unofficial overclocking mode with powerplay disabled, the card will not downclock at all. In Asus GPUTweak 2d clocks can be set manually, but I found that any increase in memory speeds resulted in memory ramping up to full speed anyways.

Either of these solutions should prevent the horizontal flickers, just depends on how you want the clock profile to be.

I've heard some cards come with a higher base speed on the RAM that prevents the issue but I'm not sure about this, I just know that my 290x does 150mhz on the ram at idle and the issue is present. I don't know if a driver fix or a bios update would be required to change the idle clocks, but until that happens the only solution seems to be manual adjustment with software.
Click to expand...

thanks for saving me some time because I was going to type exactly what you did! this is the only cause/solution that I have found. still happening with 15.8 and I'm running a 280x.
 
Kero_1116 said:
New beta driver 15.8 is out. Anyone got a chance to try it to see if it fixes our flickering issue?

I am going to try it and see if it fixes the flickering issue when I get home
Click to expand...

I'm on a trip at the moment, but will try it and report back when I get home.
 
still get flickering but it now wakes up the monitor correctly!
 
Still have the flickering here too. 15.5 drivers are the last that don't flicker for me.
 
I am trying 15.9 beta that just came out yesterday. After 5 minutes, it seems ok. Let's wait for another few hours.
 
If the 15.9s are still behaving would you mind testing the 15.9.1s? :)
 
Have you tried a single monitor using DVI or HDMI only to see if it flickers? Try running a single monitor on each port to see if a specific video output port is causing it. Also for DisplayPort out try running a straight DisplayPort cable (not one of those DP to DVI adapters) - some time the timing for the converters may cause flickering issues.
 
I can't speak for Kero, but my issues go away when I use a single monitor via any connection. I am using a display port cable to my second monitor.
 
peter@nixeus said:
Have you tried a single monitor using DVI or HDMI only to see if it flickers? Try running a single monitor on each port to see if a specific video output port is causing it. Also for DisplayPort out try running a straight DisplayPort cable (not one of those DP to DVI adapters) - some time the timing for the converters may cause flickering issues.
Click to expand...
I think it was discussed above that this happens only when using DVI and DisplayPort together
 
see? its really weird because they are the same 15.11 driver but now just released as WHQL... I always tough it was just related to bad driver installation, and this is probably the case.
 
the beta numbers were similar but the actual driver numbers in device manager were different(15.200.*** vs 15.30.***). trust me, it was not just a simple install issue.
 
no flicker here with crimson either (so far)....if theres one negative thing about amd ...its the dam random flicker....i dont see it happen for weeks on end then i see it couple times a day. i always thought it was only effected tahiti cards....SO i guess upgrading to grenada card wont make it disappear forever?
I can say for 100% sure i dont fuck driver installs...so that idea doesn't fly. with that being said when i do an occasional windows refresh it seems to take a long while before i do see a flicker again.....makes ya wonder
 
No flicker with XFX390 and Crimson.
I know it sounds douchey but double check that your cables are fully plugged in. I remember freaking out about a GPU purchase years ago due to flickering and then I just re-seated the connectors and it was fine.
Not saying that's your issue though.
 
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