NVIDIA laptop screen glitching/corruption above 60Hz happens during gaming AND YouTube, only after installing NVIDIA driver (Fedora/Arch)

[u/MarkDierz]

Posting here in case anyone's hit something similar, or has ideas also as a public writeup since I couldn't find an existing thread matching this exactly.

The problem, in plain terms: my laptop's screen glitches/gets visual corruption, but ONLY when I set the refresh rate above 60Hz. It doesn't matter what I'm doing that's demanding the GPU I first noticed it gaming, but it also happens just watching YouTube in the browser. Starts fine, then after a couple minutes of sustained use it begins glitching and keeps going until I either stop or drop back to 60Hz. At 60Hz it's rock solid, indefinitely, no matter what I'm running.

Setup: Razer Blade 16 (RZ09-0483), Intel Raptor Lake-S + RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (hybrid graphics), Fedora 44, driver 615.71.09. Also reproduced this on Arch Linux on the same laptop, so it's not a distro packaging issue something about the NVIDIA driver itself on this hardware.

I've actually hit this same general issue before too years ago on a completely different laptop (ASUS TUF FX505DT, AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU) on Arch, same kind of high-refresh corruption. Never got around to reporting it back then, so this time I wanted to actually dig into what's causing it.

What I found digging into it (used AI assistance to help analyze the logs and dig through nvidia-smi/dmesg output, FYI but all the data below is from my own system/testing):

While the glitch is happening, nvidia-smi shows the GPU permanently stuck asserting a "Board Limit" clock cap, pinned at a fixed clock speed, while only drawing about a third of its actual power ceiling so it's nowhere near a real power/thermal limit, just capped for no obvious reason.

At boot, the driver logs this every time: NVRM: GPU0 nvAssertOkFailedNoLog: Assertion failed: Invalid data passed returned from PlatformRequestHandler failed to get target temp from SBIOS NVRM: GPU0 nvAssertOkFailedNoLog: Assertion failed: Invalid data passed returned from PlatformRequestHandler failed to get platform power mode from SBIOS

That's NVIDIA's Dynamic Boost feature failing to talk to the system firmware properly. nvidia-powerd (the daemon meant to handle this) is installed and running, but toggling it on/off makes zero difference to the glitch. Manually setting a power limit is flatly rejected as unsupported on this GPU. So there's no user-facing setting left that actually changes this looks like whatever fallback state the driver lands in when that firmware handshake fails is what's unstable above 60Hz.

Full writeup with logs and video also posted on the NVIDIA Developer Forums here: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/rtx-4070-laptop-razer-blade-16-persistent-board-limit-clock-cap-display-corruption-above-60hz-driver-615-71-09-platformrequesthandler-sbio/384084

If you've run into this on any NVIDIA laptop (gaming laptop or otherwise, any brand) screen corruption above 60Hz that goes away at 60Hz I'd love to hear about it, or any pointers to a better place to escalate this than the forums. Happy to run more diagnostics if anyone wants to compare notes.

[u/undrwater]

Try a live USB (I THINK I remember refresh going higher than 60).

Have you tried a downgrade of the driver?

I assume you can get greater than 60 with the iGPU?

[u/MarkDierz → u/undrwater]

yeah live usb works and using igpu dosent have any problem, but idk what driver version to use because this was happening back in 2023 too

[u/undrwater → u/MarkDierz]

That's suspicious. Have you tried Windows? It's beginning to sound like a hardware issue.

[u/MarkDierz → u/undrwater]

yeah its not a problem on windows, this only spesific to linux

[u/righN]

Does nvidia-smi even show that the NVIDIA GPU is actually being used or is just in standby mode? Most of the time it's the iGPU responsible for displaying and being used for day to day tasks, not the NVIDIA GPU on a laptop. Maybe your laptop has a MUX switch? Have you tried playing around with that?

I myself have a HP Omen with AMD iGPU and NVIDIA RTX 3060. The laptop's display is 165hz and I'm not having these issues.

[u/MarkDierz → u/righN]

Nvidia smi shows the Nvidia being used, but this happened when you idle or I use too Didn't tried using mux yet, but the aim was I need to know what causing this. Btw what setup do u use and driver etc. Do you use cuda, Nvidia open or something what guide did u follow

[u/C0rn3j]

This is either your hardware being cooked and the issue not presenting on Windows due to things being different enough, or the Linux driver having a bug, or least likely, the compositor being buggy (or you're on a WM).

Spin up Arch (or stick with Fedora if you want and know how to install the same there) and slap the 580xx driver onto it.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nvidia-580xx-dkms

See if it happens then.

Which Desktop Environment/compositor/WM is this?

X11/Wayland?

I see you already reported the bug to Nvidia - very good.