High speed flickering in menu and game

Been playing D3 for years with no problems. But in the last few days I’ve been getting headaches and nausea when playing. This coincides with switching from a GTX1070 to an RX6900XT and going from no anti-alising to max AA. So when I fired up the game today I noticed that the screen has a slight flicker both in the menu and in game. Been using 4k resolution the whole time.

It’s quite a high speed flicker and I suspect it’s what’s causing the nausea and headaches for me. I’ve tried turning off the AA and the flicker seems to be gone (or at least I no longer notice it). Turning it back on and the flicker reappears. I tested with different AA settings and there is a minor flicker with Fullscreen and as you go up the AA quality it gets faster and much more pronounced until it maxes out at 8x AA.

Latest drivers from AMD, Windows 10 is of course up to date as is D3. Monitor is a DELL S3221QS (Freesync on) that is less than a month old. Any suggestions how to fix this? I’m switching AA off in the meantime, but with so much GPU horsepower it’s a shame not to use it fully.

edit: Just for some extra weirdness, I tried turning on the Radeon Overlay so I could see if framerates were spiking or something. While the overlay is turned on there is no flicker. Turn it off and BOOM! Flicker is back. Again, this is only happening with AA turned on.

Hey there Carnacki,

Thank you for taking the time to reach out with those details! A constant flickering can be undoubtedly concerning as well as annoying. The most common cause for such an effect is a conflicting third-party program, and this sounds increasingly likely if enabling the AMD Overlay causes the flickering to stop. With the AMD Overlay disabled, try closing potentially conflicting programs/applications by also disabling startup items with the steps below. Before trying the steps below, please close unnecessary programs and restart your computer:

  1. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open the Task Manager.
  2. Click More Details in the bottom-left.
  3. Select the Startup tab.
  4. Right-click on each item listed and select Disable. Make sure all are “Disabled”.
  5. Restart the computer.

If the issue is resolved after restarting your system, you can enable each startup application one at a time to determine which one is causing the problem. You will need to restart between each application you enable.

Note: To re-enable startup applications, follow steps 1-4 and select Enable.

On the other hand, if the same behavior occurs after restarting your system, it’s possible that old, lingering Nvidia driver files are causing issues. I recommend “Clean re-installing” your video drivers using the DDU tool, as this will also rid of any lingering Nvidia driver files.

Here is the guide on using the DDU software.

Since you already have the latest AMD driver for your graphics card, simply re-install that driver after you’re finished removing both Nvidia and AMD drivers with the DDU tool.

Hopefully that does the trick! Let us know if you have any questions. Cheers!

Thanks for the reply. There is nothing in start-up to shutdown other than the realtek audio controls and iCue. And they’re not stuff I would shut down, and they’ve been on my PC forever with no problems. On that note, I don’t usually have other apps running either when I’m gaming, though it may be possible that Firefox was still running. I’ll check that.

I will uninstall the nvidia drivers and see if that helps, though I doubt it.

My guess is that it’s something to do with Freesync and AA on the AMD drivers. Having done some googling it seems like there are Freesync problems related to flickering.

edit: Since I apparently can’t just reply…

Just updating, uninstalled the Nvidia drivers and it didn’t make any difference. Tried turning off Realtek and iCue (which is not a long term option anyway, but I thought I’d test) and that made no difference either. Also tried it with no apps (like Firefox) running and no difference.

My current solution is keeping the AMD GPU metrics overlay on screen in the bottom right corner while Diablo is running. It’s a bit annoying but at least it’s not giving me migraines and motion sickness anymore.

Carnacki, thanks for giving those steps a try! Though I’m sorry to hear that neither solved the flickering issue. The correlation between higher AA settings and the flickering certainly sounds like a driver-related issue, however, in theory this could be caused by the display/video settings of the specific Windows user account. Many potential problems related to your installation of Windows can be resolved by creating a new administrator account, logging into it, and trying the game there.

If the flickering stops while on the new admin account, this could indicate damaged or missing Windows system files or an issue with how the old user account is configured. This is somewhat common, and the easiest fix is to move any user-specific files that you wish to keep from the old user account to the new admin account. You can also work with Microsoft’s Support to troubleshoot the problem with the old account if preferred.

If the flickering persists on the new admin account and you haven’t already tried removing and re-installing the AMD drivers with the DDU tool, be sure to give that a try as well. This will help ensure that all of the machine’s driver files are fresh to minimize conflicts.

I’ve actually used SFC and DISM to make sure windows is not damaged. So that’s not an issue. And this is the first time I’ve had AMD display drivers in this install of Windows. And they’re a clean install after I removed the NVidia drivers. But that’s neither here nor there because…

I’ve pinned it down and it’s absolutely Freesync. Just tried with Freesync manually disabled and with AA on there is zero flicker. But turning on both Freesync and AA immediately causes flicker. I suspect that enabling the Radeon Overlay actually turns off Freesync (though I can’t be positive).

Anyway through a bit more research it looks like the flicker is caused when the framerate goes out of the Freesync range. (Google “AMD freesync-flicker” and you should find it on the AMD forums).

I used the CRU (found at monitortests com) to check what my monitor supports and it’s a super narrow range from 40-60. And I had the max foreground FPS set to 70 in Diablo (which is obviously outside the range). Changing that number back to 60 has eliminated the flicker. So now I can use Freesync and AA with no flicker.

Not sure why having Freesync on and AA off didn’t flicker. Because the framerate would still have been outside the freesync range. But the problem is resolved so shrugs

Maybe that info will help other people in future if they have the same problem.

Side note: not being able to include links is rubbish. Tried to include two useful links to the relevant info and it’s not possible :frowning:

Hi:

You need to convert your links to preformatted text in order for the forum software to allow them; do:

  • put the link in your post as you would normally,
  • highlight the entire link, and
  • click the </> button on the formatting bar at the top of the reply window.

Your link cannot be clicked but readers can copy it and paste it in their browser. For example, your CRU link would look like :

https://www.monitortests.com/forum/Thread-Custom-Resolution-Utility-CRU

Best of luck in your games !

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Thanks Boubou. Wish I’d known that before.

edit: Well I swear this is just messing with me now.

After testing setting the max foreground FPS in game to 60 and playing happily yesterday. Now when it’s set to 60 FPS it actually averages about 32fps so it’s choppy and has tearing. If I bump it back up to max 70 FPS then it goes back to averaging 65 fps and is smooth as butter. But of course the flicker is back.

I swear I’m beginning to wish I’d waiting a few months and bought a GTX3080 Ti instead :frowning:

I’m going to report this weirdness to AMD, maybe they’ll be able to fix it (but I doubt it). In the meantime I’m just going to go back to playing with the AMD Overlay turned on.