Diagnal line sometimes appears in Mint 18

[Red Squirrel]

There is this annoying diagnal line that seems to appear randomly in Mint 18, typically if there is lot of movement on the screen. Youtube videos will sometimes make it show up, it seems to be very random though because it does not always do it. It's like if one diagnal half is not updating at same rate as the other half. Been told it has something to do with Gsync. How do I enable that? There is no xorg.conf file in Mint and I'm not using the nvidia driver (it's a built on card, not an nvidia card).

Any way to get rid of this? To be fair, I noticed the same in Windows at work but it's a vertical line. I don't know if it's always happened and I'm only noticing now on all computers and can't unsee it or what, but it's super annoying. There's got to be some kind of way to fix that so that the entire screen updates all at once.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've seen this too, in Mint 18, when scrolling Firefox, using both AMD and Intel IGPs.

 

[pcgeek11]

I was getting this line also in Mint 18, but I haven't noticed it after I completed the latest updates ( including the kernel ).

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hmmm good to know, I noticed kernel was not checked, redid the update with kernel. Once I'm in a position to reboot I'll check to see if it fixes the issue. There was also some nvidia drivers that it installed, but I'm using the built on card which is Intel so not sure what will happen there.

 

[pcgeek11]

Hmmm good to know, I noticed kernel was not checked, redid the update with kernel. Once I'm in a position to reboot I'll check to see if it fixes the issue. There was also some nvidia drivers that it installed, but I'm using the built on card which is Intel so not sure what will happen there.

I am also usinig the Intel Graphics.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I finally got around to rebooting. Still very early to tell but so far so good. This is intermittent though so I don't want to jinx it just yet...

EDIT: Well that didn't take long. Started doing it again. So not solved. What a freaking pain. It's 2016, why is this such an issue anyway? It's not just Linux, I see it a lot in Windows too.

 

[ControlD]

If you are seeing the problem in both Windows and Linux perhaps it is hardware related. Have you considered buying a dirt cheap Nvidia graphics card and just ditching the Intel video?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've seen this on multiple different computers not just on one computer so if it's hardware related it's affecting a lot of different hardware. Main machine at work running 7 does it vertically, laptop running Mint does it diagonally. I think it's something that was always there and now that I noticed it, can't unsee it. It almost seems like it's some weird issue with today's generation of hardware in general. Maybe monitors or video cards or something that all share a similar chipset? Though I had it happen in Mint 17 and there was a fix I could do with the nvidia driver. It also did not do it on the built on Intel card. But in 18 it does.

I did find a setting in Firefox to set to true that may possibly fix it, so I'll see if that helps. It's in about:config gfx.xrender.enabled=true

But that will only fix it in Firefox obviously... but now that I think about it, the problem seems to be more relevant in web browsing, but I don't really do anything else on my machine that would really trigger it. Even movies I tend to do on my TV using a Raspberry PI, which does not do it. I did play a 1080p movie as a test on this machine and it was not doing it, but really it's hard to tell as the issue is so sporadic. It seems to take a specific circumstance for it to do it.

 

[ControlD]

Right, I was thinking perhaps it is a hardware issue as in endemic to the platform.

I am probably just being slow as usual, but my assumption here is that you are running with the Intel CPU integrated video correct? If so I am wondering why you even have Nvidia drivers installed in the first place?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I had an Nvidia card in there but took it out due to other issues. This motherboard acts really strange when POSTing if there is (any) add on video card in there and I just got tired of dealing with it and took out the card. The 2 other monitors are powered by Raspberry PIs now so it's essentially just one monitor. I was having lot of issues with Synergy (still do, it keeps crashing) so tried to go to a regular multi monitor setup, but ended up going back to single + synergy anyway. Right now I don't believe the drivers are installed, well, they might be, but they arn't active as far as I know.

Though this got me thinking, I wonder if the output I use matters. The motherboard does have another output I can use, I would just need to find a HDMI to DVI adapter.

But wonder if that setting in Firefox actually fixed it, because I have not seen it since. Seems weird that an application specific setting would fix a video issue though.

 

[Red Squirrel]

So that gfx.xrender.enabled=true setting in Firefox MAY have fixed it. So far I have not run into the issue.

 

[pcgeek11]

So that gfx.xrender.enabled=true setting in Firefox MAY have fixed it. So far I have not run into the issue.

Where exactly is this in Firefox?

 

[Red Squirrel]

In about:config (type that in address bar). If you search for xrender it should come up.

 

[pcgeek11]

Thanks!

 

[you2]

So this problem was specific to firefox ? I have not seen this issue (I've run ubuntu 12.04; 14.04 and now 16.04 on hd2000/hd3000 and hd5200 (all intel built-in gpu); however I mostly use chromium on my hd machines (I do use firefox to a limited extent but have not seen this issue). I have seen some graphic corruption with hd5200 and 16.04 but not sure if it is due to heat or 16.04 kernel/xorg (which had major rewrite around intel graphics) - the hd5200 is in a gigabyte iris brix and runs very hot under load (pretty much flatline 80c). Horrible box; just no way to ventilate heat and it is killing the wifi/sd cards.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I think it may have turned out to be. I have not seen it anywhere else, though I don't do a lot of "multimedia" stuff on this machine in general so it's hard to tell but so far that setting seems to have really fixed it. I noticed I was having the issue in the Tor browser so I changed it there too.

 

[1sikbITCH]

Can confirm this worked for me as well.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm starting to wonder if this is actually a monitor related issue. I was playing a game in Windows on a different computer but same monitor and I noticed I get the same thing, but it's two horizontal lines. One is at about the same level as the task bar and other is maybe like 1/4 from the top. I do have a 25' DVI cable since the machines are not in the same room, does cable length play a role? It's almost like it updates the screen in chunks and it does not sync right, maybe due to latency on the cable. You would think there would be a clock signal that keeps everything in sync though.

So far it's been fine in Linux though...