This has happened 3 times in the past 2 days, any advice? It goes away after reboots but always comes back.
Update: So it could be GPU death, how exciting, especially for a 1.5 year old laptop. As of now it hasn’t terribly affected my workflow, but if this persists even after future kernel/driver updates, it may be rip. I am still hopeful that it could be software related, but time will tell!
This one is a little more interesting
Update 2: I was using Windows for testing purposes, and it happened again! This was immediately after picking the laptop up, so it is definitely hardware related. This time it made a horrible noise as well, answering some of the questions. So somehow by picking the device up, maybe the internals are slightly bent, causing the issues?
The mouse cursor showing up correctly rules out a physical connection issue to the screen.
What is supposed to be on the screen right now? Is it just the deskop, an app, a game… ? That might provide more insight.
But I’d guess a hardware issue off the bat. Something with the GPU, or perhaps more specifically with VRAM.
The current picture is of a browser (Floorp).
Run a hardware diagnostic
is this issue also on in the bios?
yes = hardware error
no = software error
Artifacting like that is GPU, will probably onset easier when under stress
Reseat your RAM before trying a more expensive fix
The pattern looks like a GPU, more specifically a problem with VRAM.
This looks like a low to mid range HP laptop, so I question whether or not it even has dedicated graphics.
Systems with integrated graphics share RAM to use for graphics functions.
To test VRAM, one would use Nvidia MATS/MODS or AMD TServer/Memtune. They are not very accessible for the average user.
To test RAM, use Memtest86. This one is free and relatively straightforward.
deleted by creator
Looks like A Dying GPU.
any chance it’s overheating? did you clean the vents and checked the fans?
HP… What a surprise.
GPU.
Update or rollback drivers and see if it stops.
Are you sure? The mouse cursor appears to render correctly.
To me, it looks like defective vram. The cursor is rendered at a different physical memory location, which may still be intact.
ETA: the cursor being intact is actually very important- that quite effectively rules out the screen itself (LCD panel), since they wouldn’t care if it’s the cursor.
GPU ram could behave like this.
A chunk of dying ram would affect sections of code allowing proper rendering of cursers over garbled backgrounds.
Also, a restart could reset the ram for a while bringing it back from the dead.
Are you sure this is merely mildly infuriating?
looks like you did a sudo ▓░▒
Never do a sudo psi thundershock
Laptop GPUs are often connected using a ball grid array, which means that there aren’t any pins and they just use a ball of solder to make the connection. If the laptop overheats enough, some of the solder may melt and move causing such issues.
This happened to my laptop that I had a long time ago. I found a guide where I took out the motherboard, wrapped it in foil except where the GPU was, then used a blow dryer to heat the solder connecting the GPU to the mobo. Worked for another six months, then it happened again, so I replaced the system.
The heat to melt solder is well above the heat made by the cores in normal operation. It’s more likely that the balls crack under stress in the heat/cooling cycles. (Also if the ball is at such a high temp, the core is likely way way higher, and that would damage the core)
My intuition is that it is a hardware failure. GPUs can develop issues that show up intermittently. You can try running GPU stress-testing software to check if that’s the case.
However, did you recently update your graphics drivers? If you did, try rolling back to an older version.
Does it happen faster the 2nd time around? Probably a heat issue. Make sure the fans are working and the heatsink fins are clear of dust and debris. Try that first, and run a gpu stress test https://mprep.info/gpu/ but it could also be drivers as others have mentioned, or even a faulty or incorrectly seated ram module.
Heat is probably a trigger, but the GPU shouldn’t artifact even under high heat, the system would throttle or shutdown.
Heat may have caused this long term, and dusting may alleviate the immediate symptoms, but the GPU is still dying
