Fuzzy static noise on screen

Question

My Compaq 8710p laptop with a 256MB NVIDIA Quadro 320m was working fine. I switched to the proprietary driver and tried World of Warcraft under WINE until I got unbearable amounts of static. I restarted the computer and the static persisted. I have now moved back to the open source driver and there is now light static that is very annoying.

Picture of the static:

Is this your laptop screen or some external monitor? – André Stannek Nov 18 '12 at 23:18 — André Stannek, Nov 18 '12 at 23:18
@stonedsquirrel This is on my laptop screen. – user98348 Nov 18 '12 at 23:19 — user98348, Nov 18 '12 at 23:19
Strange, now I want to know how this turns out too ;-) – André Stannek Nov 18 '12 at 23:20 — André Stannek, Nov 18 '12 at 23:20

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 03 '16 at 01:02

I was also suffering from heavy static noise problem on my laptop's screen, while using Nvidia's the proprietary drivers.

After navigating through the nvidia-settings options, I realized the culprit of the noise, is the "Temporal Dithering" feature. Look for it under: Display Device (DFP-0 in my case) -> Controls -> Dithering Controls. It is set to Auto (Mode: Temporal) by default.

I played setting the dithering mode, to both Static and Dynamic, and the noise wasn't there anymore. I finally opted for disabling dithering in all my screens, since I don't seem to be suffering from any color banding.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 19 '12 at 01:10

1

If you get this problem, make sure you're on the open source NVIDIA driver through "Software Sources" and restart your computer. Do not log in, instead, let it sit for a bit and the noise should clear up.

answered Nov 19 '12 at 01:10

user98348

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Fuzzy static noise on screen

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