Nope! Not redrawing, not mode switching, not turning the monitor off and on fixed it, it was stuck there. Quit X, drop down to console and the whole screen is dark red with lines, with the console text over top of it. Alright, shut the thing right down, this seems like a hardware failure AGAIN. Even after the PC was shut down and there was no signal, even though the monitor went down and came back to show me the "no signal" overlay, it was the red lines behind it. Monitor failure?
I shut the PC off at the PSU and shut the monitor off at its switch and killed the power. I powered everything back up again and it was all fine
I'm not an electronics guy, but from what I understand of it, for the display to have kept that pattern, with the way an LCD works, that could have only been the timing controller left in a bad state. I don't think those things have "memory" or buffers themselves (likely registers though), it's electrical and it kind of works bass ackwards. The liquid crystals block the black backlighting with red, green and blue at various intensities when they get the voltage signals. So it's like "stuck" sending those signals to the lcd diodes because registers are mis-programmed and nothing reset them until power was removed from the unit. Unless somebody smarter than me has a better one, that's my theory.
I started a download (wanted to see the game High on Life again) and played some games with no problems. Went upstairs and did stuff, and by that time my download was complete.
I started up High on Life without incident, but when I got to the settings menu the monitor resolution setting was greyed out at 1280x720. I thought maybe it was because the game starts out as a pixelated minigame (your character is playing a video game) and I'd get access to it later (i.e. game forcing an aspect ratio or something). I didn't remember anything like that, resolution is always the first thing I check when starting a game. So I started the game and about as soon as I got control of my character, I found I couldn't use my arrow keys or click anything I was still panning with the mouse at that point. I tried key combos like alt+tab, ctrl+alt+esc (window list) and ctrl+alt+F2 and by that time things were locked up completely with audio still going.
Press power button, audio stops but there's no shutdown. So hold power button to shut down and power off. Boot to other OS, e2fsck, fix errors (almost always that'll be the systemd "journals"... add one reason why I hate those binary log databases)
When I got back I tried the game again, and this time when I pressed ESC to get to the menu it was the menu proper (not first run), and THAT was in native resolution. So I figure good, my display must be correctly detected this time but no, It's still greyed out at 1280x720. This time the game locks up on me while I'm hovering over menu items. It took me a couple of times pressing ctrl+alt+F2 but I got to another TTY this time and killed the game processes. The audio stopped and the game and all the wine processes died out and it was just Steam processes left in the list. I go back to TTY1 and my X session is gone, it's a console login prompt but defunct. Twas then that I was fucked, and had to hard boot again (couldn't get to another console again and ACPI power button shutdown wasn't responding either. It's actually an "input device" too)
OK, enough of that. Filesystem errors (even understood ones) creep me out. So I get duckduckgo'ing (I refuse to say "googling" anymore!) and from what I've gleaned, that looks CPU core related. I see lots of bullshit solutions but I also see people using affinity type settings. Either taskset or a (patched in... at least valve/proton Wine has this functionality) WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY variable. It's affinity settings.
I don't think the two issues (monitor corruption and game lockups) were related. You can imagine how that made me feel in the pit of my stomach though, but I don't think it's a graphics card failure, 29 days and 11 hours and 50 minutes after purchase (meaning, too late to send back to Amazon)
I'm not trying that game again. I removed it and I don't want to play it that badly that I'll risk hard booting. It used to work perfectly on my old system (albeit a bit sluggish in some spots because I refuse to cut graphics settings lol)
