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Has anyone NOT had flickering and/or pixelation on the G501JW?

aldel
Level 7
I'm wondering how common these problems are. I would still have time to exchange mine for a replacement from the seller, if I believed that only certain units were affected.

Also wondering if anyone has found a RELIABLE way to reproduce the problem, when it exists.

I suspect it's a hardware problem. A lot of people seem to think it can be solved by installing the right drivers, but since the problem is so intermittent, it's possible that they have just not happened to see the problem since they changed the drivers.

I also don't know of a good explanation for how drivers could cause the problems I'm seeing. Especially the flicker. And why, if it's a software problem, does it gradually go away as the machine warms up?

Here are the symptoms I see. Occasionally, after waking up from sleep (not sure if it has to be the "deep sleep" mode that it uses when not plugged in to AC), I see one or both of these problems:


  • The screen flickers like a fast strobe light. It's a bit like a fluorescent light, but it's a stronger effect than you get with a good, modern fluorescent bulb. It's NOT like a really bad fluorescent light that goes dark for half a second at a time; it's a constant, very fast flicker. Sometimes it's really bad, and sometimes it's subtle.
  • Colors other than black or white take on a very fine, grid-like pattern, which some people have described as "pixelated". The first thing I thought of was that the GPU was dithering half-tones, like it would in a 256-color mode to show colors that weren't in its gamut. These colors also come out too light; some people have described them as "washed out".


Sometimes I get one problem, sometimes the other, and sometimes both.

Both of these problems fade out gradually after waking the computer up. It can take up to an hour for the flicker to go away. When the flicker is very strong, it's almost physically painful to look at the screen.

Here is a video of what it looks like when both problems occur simultaneously. This is a timelapse video, compressing 1 hour and 13 minutes down to 1 minute and 13 seconds. The camera was aimed at a solid gray part of the screen.

The waves that you see traveling up the screen are a result of the rolling shutter on my camera; that's not really what it looks like in real life. But without the strobe effect on the screen, you wouldn't see the waves. You can see that they have basically stopped by the end.

The grid effect is clearly visible if you watch in 1080P. This effect fades out relatively rapidly. The gray stays too light for a while; by the end, when it was at its correct brightness level, it's darker.

I haven't seen the pixelation in a couple days now (since I did a "refresh Windows" and reinstalled the drivers again), and the strobe effect, when I've seen it, was pretty subtle (could have just been the backlight still warming up). But I also went several days with no problems last week, and then it happened again. This is why I'm not convinced that changing drivers actually fixes the problem.

I'm really frustrated by the amount of time I've spent trying to fix this. Due to lost productivity, I arguably would have saved money by buying a high-end Macbook Pro or Dell XPS for $800 more.
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42 REPLIES 42

I still have this issue AFTER RMA'ing the laptop for it. Asus, this really needs to be addressed.

Nihilat wrote:
I still have this issue AFTER RMA'ing the laptop for it. Asus, this really needs to be addressed.


Hi Nihilat,

Kash mentioned he is having this issue with Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, which OS are you using?

Cheers.

dlinfiniti
Level 7
Mine doesn't seem to have this problem

dlinfiniti and KashEsq and anyone else who hasn't had serious problems: how long have you had your G501? Do you use it a lot? Do you regularly close the lid, or put it to sleep in some other way, when you're not using it? The problem seems to be infrequent, and for many of us it only happens after waking the computer up from sleep mode. So I wonder if some people may simply have not seen it yet, even if the problem exists on their computer.

I also sometimes saw a bit of flicker for a few seconds after plugging/unplugging the charger, or after adjusting the screen brightness. I think this was just a side effect of changing the backlight level, and it wasn't something I would complain about. It was nothing compared to the serious problems I described before.

KashEsq
Level 7
I only seem to have this problem for a few seconds after taking the laptop off the charger, and then the issue goes away. I don't get flickering when the laptop is plugged in. I'm thinking it's an issue with the Intel graphics driver bugging out when switching to a battery profile.

Also, I should mention that this issue exists on both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 TP (build 10162).

spindrift
Level 7
I got heavy flickering and black lines when gaming.
Im wondering if its power related. I'm on 220V power. how about you guys?

spindrift
Level 7
In fact, unplugging the mains totally removes any flickering or black lines

wrldsuksgo2mars
Level 7
I got my G501JW-DS71 yesterday. I set it up and brought it to the office. While it was plugged in, I left the room for a bit and the screen went to sleep as expected. When I turned it on, it was flickering very badly. It is extremely noticeable on neutral gray content (for example developer.apple.com => Member Center login or any graying overlay on a website during ads, etc). After some time, the issue seems to fade. I tried various things to fix it, updated all the video drivers, toggle the screen on and off. Nothing seemed to be absolutely correlated. I never saw the issue start when I was operating on battery but if I unplugged from AC it did not resolved the problem.

Today, I continued setting things up on the machine. I installed Portal 2 and tried it out on battery and plugged into the wall. I didn't experience any pixelation or lines like other have reported, but I did get several instances where the screen was painfully flickering after letting the screen go to sleep.

I found this interesting link: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=159817 where people were discussing how to change the PWM modulation of the display programmatically which I think is essentially what the flickering is. Unfortunately, Intel has since updated their drivers so the bit of source code here can not work.

So I continued setting things up... I installed HyperV and the Visual Studio Android Emulators for my development work. After HyperV was enabled, somehow the screen looked different. Richer color and smooth brightness fading when unplugging and replugging in the AC cord. I left the machine alone to suspend the screen a few times and the flickering didn't happen.

I think I'll have to see how it goes for a few more days, but it looks like somehow HyperV interacts with the video drivers to fix the problem... Unfortunately it might be hard for others to try this, as I had to buy the Windows Pro Pack for 99 just to be able to use HyperV. I saw the OP said sometimes it doesn't happen for days, hope the change isn't a fluke...

wrldsuksgo2mars
Level 7
Darn! Spoke too soon. This morning I let it start sit for 20 minutes or so charging with the screen switching off. When I unlocked, the horrible flickering was back. 😞 Tried to start a HyperV VM, didn't change anything, so my theory is bunk.

What can we do to eliminate this horrible flickering?

spindrift
Level 7
Anyone tried linux yet?