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I'm not sure what the proper terminology is for this, but I'm having a problem with images displaying on my screen having very coarse "shading" or "blending" coloration. As an example - a picture of a sunset, it should gradually fade from a dark blue (almost black) to a brighter blue and eventually into other colors. What appears to be happening is that there are a few shades of blue used, and there are obvious bands of each color from the dark to the light. Similarly, pictures of people with shadows on their face, it almost looks like the shadow is a smudge of dirt on the face or something like that. Hopefully this gives an idea of my issue.

I just noticed this recently, I'm sure if it would have been happening previously, I would have been aware of it, it is not "horrible", but it is "obvious".

This began recently (a couple weeks ago) when I had a problem with my system failing. I suspect it was due to heat, but I logged on to my machine, and tried to use Firefox, but while it tried to display the window, it wasn't putting the menu bar along the top (so I couldn't get to File->Print for example). The system was almost unresponsive, and I ended up pushing the reset button. It never came up again (not even POST, no BIOS splash screen - it was dead).

OK, so I purchased a full complement of MOBO/CPU/RAM, and ultimately a new PS as well (the old one didn't have an 8-pin 12v connector, just 4-pins). So, basically I salvaged my SSD/HDD drives (SSD had Ubuntu, HDD was /home) and my video card. I assembled the new system, fired it up, and it came up pretty much OK (had a couple of minor issues to resolve).

At this point I was running a 32-bit Ubuntu 14.04 installation. Everything seemed pretty good. However I started noticing my issue on a few images. At first my assumption was that it was related to the image itself. However, I was also scheming to upgrade my Linux to a 64-bit version to take advantage of the 16 GB of RAM I'd purchased. So my focus was actually on planning that, and the video issue wasn't too much in mind.

So, now I've upgraded to a 64-bit Xubuntu release 16.04.1 which came up and runs nicely, but I've been noticing my issue on this system too. I would say with confidence that it wasn't happening before, it is significant enough that I have no doubt I'd have seen it long ago, but now I can't NOT see it.

I've verified (or at least I believe I have) that I'm running the latest proprietary Nvidia driver:

lsmod produces this:

nvidia_uvm 696320 0 nvidia_modeset 745472 2 nvidia 10076160 45 nvidia_modeset,nvidia_uvm

My new CPU is a Skylake i7 in case that might have an impact. I saw some issue mentioned with the 16.04 release having booting trouble (or maybe couldn't display the desktop once it booted or something) apparently related to some Skylake issue, which was presumably resolved in 16.04.1, so perhaps this could be something similar (or a red herring).

Also, the graphics card identifies as a GF119 [GeForce GT 610].

If anyone can suggest some things to try it would be appreciated. Even if someone can inform me of what the terminology would be so I might be able to get better google results, that might be all I need. Is this a "shading" issue, or a "blending", or "fading" or what? My initial impression was that maybe there weren't enough colors to produce a smooth blend, but it looks like the color depth is set to 24-bit, so I don't suppose you get much more than that.

Perhaps my graphics card is somehow not fully capable anymore, after whatever happened to the rest of the system. At some point maybe I just by another card and try that.

Thanks,

Greg Youngdahl

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Well, as it turns out, my problem had nothing to do with my video card, or driver, or Ubuntu itself. Apparently my monitor has settings for different types of things that may be displayed upon it. A few are "Sports", "Theater", "Night Scenes", "Scenery", and a couple others including "Normal". This is controlled by one of the switches along the bottom of the monitor (pressing the switch cycles through the various options). So, apparently while I was working on the changes I made I ended up moving the monitor in such a way as to press that switch and change its setting. Once I discovered this I tried various settings and discovered that the "Normal" setting made everything look as it had before.

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