Flickering pixel artifacts all over the place - what can I do?

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1

Since about two days, my display has these flickering pixels (grey in the picture). They appear in various colors all around the screen.
I think I can rule out a hardware issue, because the pixels move and sometimes disappear in a reproducible way when I move windows over the screen.
I tried using a different NVIDIA driver for my GTX 970, the issue persists with nvidia-driver-570 and nvidia-driver-575.

What could I try next to troubleshoot?

My specs:

  • Operating System: Kubuntu 25.04
  • KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.6
  • KDE Frameworks Version: 6.14.0
  • Qt Version: 6.8.3
  • Kernel Version: 6.14.0-29-generic (64-bit)
  • Graphics Platform: Wayland
  • Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz
  • Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM
  • Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

20250904_214439
20250904_2144391920×1440 178 KB

2

After extensive troubleshooting (different NVIDIA driver versions, trying nouveau, booting a live system, trying X11, etc etc etc), I changed the cable.
Turns out, it probably wasn’t plugged in properly! Now, everything works as expected and the flickering pixels were gone!

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