I’ve run into a potential bug. My screen will occasionally change brightness on its own despite having the Setting, “Change brightness automatically when lighting changes” un-selected. Is there another setting I’m unaware of that needs to be turned off also?
This appears to be un-related to the dim my screen setting in the power plan as it will occur while I’m actively using the laptop. It has occurred in low and well lit scenarios. I am not often in moderately lit environments to test this.
I’ve running the 1165-G7, 32GB 3200 ram, 1TB WD 750, 2 USB C, 2 USB A, webcam and microphone switches turned off, and Windows 10 Pro version 10.0.19043, build 19043.
Framework driver package was installed and all other aspects of the laptop function normally.
Turns out I’ve never had that program turned on before and hadn’t even accepted the end-user-license agreement. So while I’ve turned those off does anyone think that they would be having that effect even if I hadn’t ever used them before? If so software taking action before the user has accepted the end-user-license agreement is a serious issue. Not saying this happened here, but just a thought that occurred. We’d need a lot more evidence before even being able to suggest such a thing within a legal context.
Re: legality, this may be on Framework since I’m assuming their one-click automated drivers installer bypasses the user agreement prompts. I’m far from an expert on this subject though, just guessing.
I hope I’m wrong because it’d be annoying to have to press ‘agree’ for every single driver in the bundle installer.
I want to confirm that “Display Power Savings” that feesh describes as “adaptive contrast” is exactly the problem I had. Disabling it solved the “dimming” or “brightness” problem as I’d describe it. Thanks, feesh!
I found Adaptive Brightness was already disabled, and disabling Display Power Savings had no effect.
The relevant option for me (in the Intel Graphcis Command Center) was actually under Display > Local Adaptive Contrast Enhancement. Disabling this fixed the issue for me.
I was recently having a weird artifact where the entire screen brightness would change depending on how bright everything on the screen was. I noticed it because I was pausing a windowed game which would bring up a dark screen with “Paused” text on it and all the windows on the desktop would change brightness when this happened. I have a slowmo video of it if anybody is interested.
I found people saying to lower the “Power Efficiency Setting” in the Intel Graphics Command Center to fix this. So I installed the Graphics Command Center, and lowered the setting, which did fix the problem. And then the funny thing is I put the setting back up to its old maximum value and the problem was still fixed!
I think I see this also. The screen looks like it is doing a small flicker every now and then.
If I put a finger over the sensor located at the top center of the screen, near the camera enable/disable switches. The screen gets dimmer, if I remove my finger, the screen gets brighter again.
I am on Ubuntu 24.04, to disable the auto-brightness feature, go to Settings->Power->Power Saving - Automatic Screen Brightness
Unfortunately changing the power settings on Fedora 40 does not fix this behavior. I can reproduce it in a deterministic way by switching between a white browser window and a black terminal window. Around 7 seconds after each switch, the screen either dims or brightens up slightly. (AMD Ryzen 7840U)
On Linux, the “automatic screen brightness” just looks like a flicker to me.
Mobile phones have a similar feature where the brightness of the mobile phone screen adjusts to ambient light, but on the mobile phone it is not so noticeable.
While the AMD GPU has 0-65536 available brightness settings, Linux/Gnome seem to only let the range be 0-255 and then also in steps of about 5.
I think if Linux gnome actually controlled all 65536 levels, and gradually switch between settings, there would not be any noticeable flicker. So for now, I think the problem is a Linux Gnome bug, and not a FW specific problem.
I found the solution and no longer have to compromise between picking either terminals which are too dark or having white websites being way too bright:
Add amdgpu.abmlevel=0 in /etc/defaults/grub to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX and run sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.
No idea why this is the default, because it requires me to either manually adjust the brightness all the time or switch to light colorschemes in my terminals and editors.
I’m not sure if this applies to everyone, but I have solved this for my system (FW16 Batch 20, Fedora 40 Sway). While on battery power power-profiles-daemon sets panel-power-savings to
3 on power-saver (significant flickering)
1 on balanced (still a bit)
0 on performance (fully off)
Run cat /sys/class/backlight/amdgpu_bl1/device/amdgpu/panel_power_savings to see the current level (note you may need to replace amdgpu_bl1 with another backlight device, list all by running ls /sys/class/backlight).
Follow these steps to disable this behaviour (adapted from cyrozap’s post):
Run cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/power-profiles-daemon.service | grep ExecStart= to find the path to your PPD executable
