SDB:NV driver: black flashing lines on the screen

From openSUSE

Symptom

This is a rare problem that manifests itself with short black lines randomly blinking on the screen; the effect occurs just often enough to be annoying, but otherwise harmless. It has some special characteristics:

• only occurs with some NVidia cards, probably only with specific revisions of the hardware
• occurs with the "nv" graphics driver (the default OpenSource driver), the "vesa" driver, and also with the "nouveau" driver (the new OpenSource driver)
• only occurs with applications that make massive use of advanced X drawing features, like compositing (KDE 4.0 and higher are the most prominent example)

Cause

Exact cause is unknown. Apparently it is a small bug or incompatibility with some revisions of the graphics card. So far, there were only two reports of this problem, one with a GeForce 6200 TurboCache card, and one with the GeForce 7300 SE card, both made by ASUS.

There is a Bugzilla record about this problem: http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=370903. If you are affected by this bug, please add a note there with complete information about your graphics card.

Solution

These are known workarounds:

• using the the binary NVidia driver ("nvidia")
• using the framebuffer driver ("fbdev")
• reducing display bit depth to 16 bpp was reported to help in one of the two reported cases.