Sudden Display "burn in" on 16"

I have searched previous posts here, and I think no one else had my issues before, at least no one on here.

I’ll try to be as detailed as possible, as I genuinely don’t know what could cause this, and since some issues have been ongoing since I got this laptop, I’d rather cover too much, than too little.

I’ll add a TLDR at the end.

So, since I got my FW 16” (with a Ryzen 7 7840 and radeon 7700 GPU) in July last year, it has occasionally (getting more frequent over time) been having issues. The Built-In-Screen occasionally freezes, and only returns when the screen is fully disabled & re-enabled, or sometimes until the laptop is restarted. While I am using fedora primarily, this issue also occurs on Windows, and the very recent issue (which ill get to) has even persistent in the Bios.

Early on, the lower half of the screen would also glitch about pretty aggressively, but that issue seems to have dissipated almost completely recently.

These issues primarily occur when the laptop’s graphics are put under load for some time.

Recently, over the last few months, the laptop has occasionally just completely frozen up, leaving no traces in the logs even. To me, it appears as if the laptop just stops, while keeping the last rendered frame displayed.

When this issue first occurred, I was in the middle of my high school exams, so I did not go to great lengths to find a solution, and frankly, haven’t bothered since.

Yesterday, the build in screen once again froze a few minutes before I went to bed. When I booted it back up today, the image that had frozen in yesterday was flickering over the actual desktop. I rebooted; the issue didn’t go away, i booted into windows, and noticed that the image was still flickering about over the bios screen and windows.

External displays have continued to function as usual in any of the cases (except for the full system freezes).

What have I tried to fix this:

  • booted into different OS / the Bios
  • Reduced the display resolution, though the “burnd in“ image stayed sharp
  • re-attached the display cable
  • removed both ram sticks
  • started without a battery
  • (tried to) start without the dedicated GPU; had no image output

TLDR:

My Framework 16” with radeon GPU has had the built-in screen freeze occasionally since I got it, the issue got more frequent recently, and the system even started crashing completely. Yesterday, the screen froze, and appeared to have that frozen frame “burned in“ today.

I can’t figure out what is causing this, never mind how I could fix it, so hopefully someone here can help me figure this out!

Preemptively, thanks for any help.

EDIT: I just got back to the afflicted laptop, and it appears the “burn in“ is slowly dissipating.

I had this happen on my FW16 today as well. Same suggested cause of high load on the system causing it to freeze an image in place, same weird flickering after rebooting. I didn’t notice the problem as I was working remotely over Parsec so it was probably frozen on the screen for around 10 minutes before I tried to reboot it. Leaving images in place for that length of time doesn’t reproduce the issue. That probably doesn’t help with root causing the issue, sadly. But, you’re not alone in having experienced this problem.

Given that you’ve observed similarly to me that the “retention” appears to persist across operating systems and even in the UEFI firmware screens, but goes away temporarily with screen blanking, I’m wondering if its some niche firmware issue with the display itself rather than physical LCD image retention since holding a bright still image on the screen doesn’t reproduce.

Just so you don’t think you are alone:

I just had the exact same thing happening to me with the general same overall behaviour.

Framework 16, AMD dGPU
EndaevourOS (Xfce)
Current drivers, Firmware and such. Oh, and regarding the firmware: an update from 4.02 to 4.03 did not help (did that tonight after the problem came up).

Trying every reset in the book (including, but not limited to Battery removal, dGPU removal, etc.) did not fix the problem, but as of writing it seems it’s slowly fading away, although the display is still flickering.

Since I have two external monitors, the “regular” freezing problem is solved by

xrandr --output eDP-1 --off
sleep 1
xrandr --output eDP-1 --set "scaling mode" None --mode 2560x1600 --rate 165

which I have on a hotkey … that’s not a solution, rather a workaround. amdgpu debug mask is already set.

Anyone with a solution out there?