Help please: This is really weird display bug and hard to replicate.

Beefy_Crunch_Burrito · July 27, 2023

It’s existence makes me worried something is wrong with either my monitor or GPU even though it’s behavior points to it being purely a driver/OS issue.

The bug is these small sparkling/flickering horizontal lines appearing on screen: https://imgur.com/a/Sf0LAk7

These lines appear all over the screen, but I just zoomed in on one portion to try to capture them. Now, what’s weird is that these lines appear ONLY under these specific conditions:

- After resetting Windows (formatting the PC)

- After installing the Nvidia driver for my RTX 4080

- Before enabling HDR for the first time

So this bug will not appear if I have no video driver installed (I tested by uninstalling and clean installing two different drivers multiple times), or if I’ve enabled HDR in windows at all. That is the weirdest thing about this. The bug appears only if I’ve never enabled HDR. Once I enable HDR, the bug goes away in both SDR and HDR mode and never comes back.

This was so confusing to me that I actually reset Windows a second time to see if it was a one off issue, and the bug came back! Until I enabled HDR of course.

The monitor that’s connected to the RTX 4080 is the LG 27GR95QE-B OLED HDR monitor. Both times I tried this I used different DP 1.4 cables and the behavior was exactly the same. Before this, I connected a new PC to this monitor that had an RTX 4070 Ti and this bug did not occur, so I don’t think it’s the monitor alone.

This behavior makes me think that it’s a conflict specifically between the RTX 4080 driver and the monitor’s firmware not knowing if HDR is enabled at first boot until I actually enable it and Windows sends a clear signal that HDR is enabled. But sparkling lines on screen make me worry about getting a lemon RTX 4080, even though the problem goes away forever once I enable HDR.

What is causing this? Google is not providing any help, and the issue is so relatively small that I’m wondering if people other than me are experiencing it and just not noticing. Yes, I know one could argue it’s a nonissue since it only appears when setting up the computer, but it’s unintended behavior and I want to know if there’s fault with the hardware so I can RMA if necessary. Thank you.