How to fix flickering lines all over the game window in Minecraft and distortions in browsers and menus on a Lenovo Ideapad with NVIDIA graphics card?

Question

I have reset an outdated Lenovo Ideapad Z710, Model Name 20250, with a dual graphics card in it:

• integrated graphics card: the energy saving onboard card Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600
• dedicated graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 840M.

The OS is Windows 10 Home Version 10.0.19045 Build 19045. I have set up Windows from the scratch, with a new stick to boot with the Windows version that I got, built with rufus-4.2 from a Windows 64bit install download on another computer. I still had to download Gigabytes now to get it updated afterwards, and now, I am still in the same old Build.

I do not know how to find out which card is in use when I play Minecraft. If I check how to check if nvidia or intel graphics is being used [closed] in the normal Windows, not while playing, I see both cards so that I cannot say from this what is in use.

When I start Minecraft, the menu is already hit by strange lightning of a few small lines or stripes around the same places, let us say just 4 of them, but everything is still readable and it would be nothing to care about if it was not for the game itself that has 100s or 1000s of lines or stripes flickering all over the place, anywhere, as if you saw the whole graphics machine spinning up weird matrices:

In the device manager, you see that both cards have their drivers installed and ready.

NVIDIA card cannot even let me browse the internet

I went into the "NVIDIA Control Panel" following Can I force Steam to use my Nvidia GPU instead of the integrated Intel card?, as a comment asked me to. I then changed the chosen card to NVIDIA by default for anything, just to see how it looks outside the game, and now I have blurry, distorted and buggy graphics even when browsing on a website or going through system settings of Windows:

Clearly, the NVIDIA driver leads to this problem, but in the device manager, I cannot update it any further.

What to do to get rid of the window full of lines or stripes in all directions in Minecraft, or any other distorted graphics when surfing the internet with NVIDIA card switched on (forced mode)?

Answer 1

TLDR

The easy fix is to deactivate the NVIDIA card in the Device Manager. There might also be a fix in installing a better driver for the NVIDIA card that is offered by Windows, but it is not for sure from what I checked.

Checking

The problem lies in the NVIDIA driver. You cannot update it from the device manager. You need to update the driver with the Windows Updates menu:

and there, click on "optional updates", the ones that are not automatically made by Windows so that you need to go through a menu:

and mark the checkbox yourself:

--> NVIDIA - Display - 1/15/2017 12:00:00 AM - 21.21.13.7667

Install only this driver, do not mark any other driver in the list, see the warning remark further below.

Afterwards, surfing in a browser or going through the Windows menus works again, as well as the game:

There is still this strange black box on this screenshot, but turning around from there, I did not see it anymore, and turning back, it came back again. Strange, but nothing to mess with for now. The main thing was the stripes and lines all over the place, not this small black box.

Now that everything works again as it should, I can also switch back to let Windows choose which graphics card is best, to save some energy:

and:

and:

Strangely, my "NVIDIA Control Panel" settings to take only the integrated card for Minecraft, as you can set it in the programs tab, do not work. Therefore, it could be that any changes you made in the "NVIDIA Control Panel" did not work for Minecraft anyway.

Be careful as soon as it runs (but likely, I am wrong here, see remark below)

Since it was so helpful, I thought I better install any other drivers in the optional updates as well, just in case. But now the old graphics stripes and lines bug is back. Anybody who runs into this and has the time and nerves to risk this: do not mark all of the driver updates in one go. It will then restart the computer many times anyway. Mark just a few or even one by one. Then check every time whether Minecraft still works. By this, we can find out which of the additional optional driver updates trouble the graphics card, and which not.

It seems as if installing all of the drivers is less likely the problem here than restarting the computer. It is likely that after installation of the NVIDIA driver, the NVIDIA card was not available to the system without a restart, and therefore, Minecraft had to take the integrated card. And that worked with the graphics. So that after a restart, Minecraft could take the NVIDIA card again and had the bug again.

Easy fix / workaround that you can always try

You can go to the Device Manager and just deactivate the NVIDIA card with right click --> deactivate. You can do this while the game is running. You will then see the good graphics rightaway, no need to restart the game. Activate the NVIDIA card as soon as you might need it for something else.

This is also the workaround after the bugs have come back if you installed all of the drivers; and I doubt that installing the other drivers has brought back the bugs. Much more likely is that installing a new NVIDIA driver has deactivated the card till the next restart. And that is why suddenly Minecraft worked right after the update but did not work anymore after the restart.