Display Scaling Issue - Flickering/Shadowing of horizontal lines on box edges.

[Fuzzball]

Got a new 17" Defiance laptop. It has an inbuilt Intel graphics card, and I chose an RTX 3080 for it. I changed the Windows display settings to scale to 125%, as I find the default 100% a bit small. In the NVIDIA Control Panel I set the RTX card as the default for programs, but I'm guessing the Intel card is used for a lot of things anyway.

I've noticed on occasion that thin, horizontal black lines (like you'd see on the edge of a Windows dialog box, or the edge of an image file) flicker, seemingly producing a "shadow". I will try to take a video and attach it later.

(The only reliable way I have to see this is on this web page. [I was troubleshooting another issue.] On a few of the images displayed on the page, I get this shadow flickering on the bottom edge of the image, but not all along the straight line... Just a section in the centre.)

Interestingly, when I change the scale back down to 100%, the issue seems to instantly stop. I don't want to use this as a solution though, as I do find 100% scale too small. I never had this issue on my previous PCS laptop, but that only had the NVIDIA GTX 980M, with no Intel graphics card.

When I go looking through Windows display settings and reach the option to update the drivers for the Intel card, it says they're up to date.

What can I do?

UPDATE: Here's a link I've created on a file transfer site containing two videos I took of my screen.

VID_20210323_190051.mp4 and 1 more file

2 files sent via WeTransfer, the simplest way to send your files around the world

we.tl

 

[SpyderTracks]

Got a new 17" Defiance laptop. It has an inbuilt Intel graphics card, and I chose an RTX 3080 for it. I changed the Windows display settings to scale to 125%, as I find the default 100% a bit small. In the NVIDIA Control Panel I set the RTX card as the default for programs, but I'm guessing the Intel card is used for a lot of things anyway.

I've noticed on occasion that thin, horizontal black lines (like you'd see on the edge of a Windows dialog box, or the edge of an image file) flicker, seemingly producing a "shadow". I will try to take a video and attach it later.

(The only reliable way I have to see this is on this web page. [I was troubleshooting another issue.] On a few of the images displayed on the page, I get this shadow flickering on the bottom edge of the image, but not all along the straight line... Just a section in the centre.)

Interestingly, when I change the scale back down to 100%, the issue seems to instantly stop. I don't want to use this as a solution though, as I do find 100% scale too small. I never had this issue on my previous PCS laptop, but that only had the NVIDIA GTX 980M, with no Intel graphics card.

When I go looking through Windows display settings and reach the option to update the drivers for the Intel card, it says they're up to date.

What can I do?

Did you reboot after applying the scaling? You need to.

 

[Fuzzball]

Did you reboot after applying the scaling? You need to.

Yes, restarting the computer after changing settings didn't seem to affect anything.

What was interesting is that when I changed the scaling back down to 100%, it INSTANTLY seemed to stop the flickering, without having to close it restart anything. Changing it back to 125% instantly made the problem on that webpage reappear.

 

[Fuzzball]

Well this one is very weird. The flickering/artefacting would appear on that webpage whenever Chrome thought its display was at 125%, but no other scale. So if Windows' display was 100% and Chrome's was 125%, the issue would occur. If Windows was 125% and Chrome was 100%, then flickering. But not at any other scaling levels.

Weirdly, if I turned off hardware acceleration in Chrome, the issue would disappear! But I did notice artefacting on another Windows box later.

I had a long phone call with PCS tech support and we tried all the reinstalling of graphics drivers, but to no help. The issue doesn't appear on other screens (e.g. when tech support was accessing my laptop remotely, or I connected it to the TV), so we think it's ultimately a problem with the Windows install or maybe the hardware.

I've booked it in for an RMA return, where they will also look at my headphones sound issue I posted in another thread.

Just writing all this as an update for anyone interested, or if they come across this issue themselves.