What GPU and do you have the possibilit to test with another GPU?

Due the fact your monitor is working again I guess your gpu is broken and I never heard of a PC crash damaging monitor firmware

I'm using an MSI 980ti, and I am not able to test another GPU (ryzen CPU, no integrated graphics).

I got it new early last year, and up till now I haven't had any display issues (unless you count Windows becoming corrupt and dying on me).

What monitor is this?

It's a Viewsonic VA2719-smhd (27" 1440p IPS).

In use since early last year, and has behaved well up until this point.

Alright, so no freesync or anything like it. Best guess is a bug in either the nvidia driver, mesalib, or the kernel. This might be a little scary, but I sincerely doubt your monitor is being damaged. There's probably just something goofy with the signaling (HDMI/Displayport).

There's a couple of things you could try to work around this:

• Hope it doesn't happen again and wait for all the updates next week
• Uninstall the nvidia-glx-driver and try the older nvidia-390-glx-driver or the newer nvidia-beta-driver
• Try swapping HDMI for Displayport or vice-versa

So I'm guessing my best bet currently is:

• Run sudo eopkg remove nvidia-glx-driver && sudo eopkg install nvidia-390-glx-driver
• Hope it doesn't happen again

A few other points:

1. What made me particularly concerned wasn't so much what happened before I turned off the monitor, but that after (a) unplugging the monitor HDMI cable, (b) restarting the monitor (c) turning monitor mains power off and on again I still had issues
2. Is it worth downgrading the kernel too?
3. What's happening with the updates next week that would be likely to resolve this issue?

1. Most monitors nowadays have some non-volatile memory to store settings. You'd be surprised how much survives an over night power outtage

2. I think you'll be better off upgrading next Friday, tbh.

3. I'll be updating the kernel, mesalib, and some xorg stuff tomorrow. You'd be surprised how much gets fixed with just updating those.

What I did is go from the nvidia driver to nouveau. Has been fine up till now, and then in a minor glitch, I got some patchy squares to appear around my screen (they went away after I clicked a window).

Does this indicate anything about the original problem, or would this be a separate one?

Has been fine up till now, and then in a minor glitch, I got some patchy squares to appear around my screen (they went away after I clicked a window).

I'd say it's nouveau bug.
On my Nvidia 1080 there are so many issues with nouveau it's unsuitable even for web browsing, official drivers are the only way to go.

@mati865 the original, and imo more serious issue was with the official drivers.

As an owner of a 980ti I can tell you there isn't any issue with the drivers, for me personally it looks more like a hardware issue so your GPU is dying in short, because the first picture remembers me of my dying 960 I had.

Oh dear. That does not sound good. I've been using this card for around one year (acquired unused) and never had any issues with it before. That would be rather annoying.

Would doing anything like putting it through the Unigin Heaven benchmark in Windows help confirm whether it is/isn't a GPU issue?

Update

On Windows 10 I ran both MSI Kombuster for 15 mins, and Unigin Heaven for 30 mins; these are the results I got:

MSI Kombuster (15 min)

Unigin Heaven (30 min)

Overall

Throughout both benchmarks, the GPU reached a max temp of ~70°C (I have aftermarket cooling), and displayed no issues.

Conclusion

While this is by no means conclusive, this does not suggest any hardware issue with my graphics card.

Another Update

I applied the Friday updates and installed the Nvidia driver. Within two hours I had two issues. I've switched back to the noeveau driver.

This is the second graphical issue.

I have similar issues when I wake up from standby mode with lattedock icons, till I hover over it.

Yea that issue is also fairly common for Electron / Chromium based applications, it is not indicative of anything nor is it tied to any one specific update. Been having it with Atom, VS Code, etc. since the dawn of time.

Thanks Girtablulu and Josh. That's reassuring to hear. Interesting that I haven't had that happen with neoveau though.

Update

I've had a similar issue to that I had initially, again.

Symptoms

1. Desktop screen completely froze
2. Ctrl+Alt+F1 did nothing
3. I had music in the background, the last second or so started looping

At the time I had the following applications open:

• Firefox
• Bookworm
• Lollypop
• VS Code

And was simply working through a book in bookworm.

I still have yet to see any indication that this is actually a Solus-specific issue. It sounds more like your GPU and Monitor don't play nice with the proprietary Nvidia driver which is way more common than you think.

From what I've heard in this thread, that seems like the most likely issue. Oh well. Feel free to close this for now and I'll comment again if anything happens differently to that I have already spoken about.