Surface Pro 9 Screen Flickers/Scramble

I would try recording with smartphone of the physical screen, using software may prevent the appearance.

Its probably just a driver bug if you can't reproduce without the Intel drivers. New electronic products these days unfortunately are buggy (and complex) and the general public have become QA testers. Companies seem to have offloaded testing to the public in lieu for getting products out the door.

The weird thing is, is this an issue across all sp9s? I haven't seen much evidence aside from here in these forums and nowhere else on other social media complaining of the issue. Is there a compilation all of the complaints so we can share with MS support how widely an issue this is some can have them address?

I've got a core i7 graphite 16/256 model.

I did some more testing and am close to giving up that there will be a fix very soon...

Short summary, the screen tears, flickering, scrambling, display errors happen randomly and cannot be directly forced. Apparently, when deinstalling the Intel Xe Iris driver all the flickerings etc are gone, but also all screen adjustment features, eg 120Hz, HDR, night time, adaptive lighting etc. They are happening more often whenever there is more going on on the screen, eg youtube/netflix videos, lighting change effects and animations albei still random.

I did not find any way to reproduce them reliably and the shape and coloring of the screen flickers, tears and scrambles is also not always the same.

I tried recording the flickers with a screen recording software. I figured out that the flickers are appearing on the physical screen but apparently not on the video recordings! Not a single video I took had flickers in them and I took like ten with personally confirmed flickers. The only other explanation I could come up with, is that the flickers hide on frames that weren't recorded, ie I recorded with less than 120Hz. (I will try to repead the flickers on lower Hz and try to record everything frame perfect but statistics already tells me that it is suspicious that not a single flickering was recorded properly despite having a large sample size...).

I would really like that MS would acknowledge the issue and would have a look themselves what is going on on the affected devices. It might not be MS fault but Intels considering it apparently only happens when the official Intel driver is installed and not when the MS backup driver is used.

Same issue here, brand new Surface Pro 9.

Screen just glitches for a very short period of time during web browsing or youtube, it's impossible to replicate or establish a pattern due to the random nature of the problem.

I am fearful this is a hardware or panel issue.

If this is true we're in trouble as generally manufacturers facing such fundamental issues will generally try to muzzle/skirt around the real problems (typically costly) for months on end citing different reasons like "sample not representative enough".

Microsoft - it's time you step up and release an acknowledgement of the situation, don't sit and wait for our product warranties to drain away and return windows to close.

correction: I think the flickering is back...

Edit: Nope, still flickering after installing the ntel Iris Xe driver.

I hope I found a temporary fix for that. Apparently it really is caused by the Intel Iris Xe Driver automatically supplied with Windows Update.

When uninstalling the drive in the device manager, the flickering is gone, however, also all features that usually come with the driver (120Hz refresh rate etc).

For the guys having flickering problems, try out this:

1. Update your machine to most recent drivers etc, e.g. recent Win11 Surface Pro 9 Update (~719MB)
2. Download the most recent Intel Iris Xe driver package from Intel, but do not install it yet!
3. Remove Intel Iris Xe and driver from device manager

(you can also look for display driver uninstaller)

4. install the Intel version of the driver before Win11 automatically updates and downloads its own driver again via windows update
5. restart

For my device, I am not having flickering screens currently anymore (at least none seen during the testing period). Let's hope a future windows update does not override my current Intel Iris Xe driver.