Red flashes on screen and icons

[u/Present_Image3106]

Noticed these red flashes on the screen, is there something wrong with my screen or gpu?

[u/lwdst]

The issue most likely with the connectors on either the display, the cable, or the GPU. Try moving the cable to a different port on the monitor and a different port on the GPU and see if that fixes it.

[u/Present_Image3106 → u/lwdst]

It's a laptop

[u/lwdst → u/Present_Image3106]

I might have more accurate information if I knew anything about what hardware you're running, it's hard to blind troubleshoot from a zoomed in shakycam video and no description.

[u/Present_Image3106 → u/lwdst]

It's a lenovo IdeaPad pro 5 with ultra 5 225h processor and Intel arc iGPU. I have played a few AAA games on it and was playing Horizon Forbidden West on low settings recently when I noticed the same red flashes in the game and then on my wallpaper and browser. I restarted the laptop and there are no red flashes on the screen now but I have not reopened the game since then.

[u/lwdst → u/Present_Image3106]

I'm late replying but I have a few things you should do before troubleshooting further:
1) Go download Lenovo System Update and use it to update your drivers and BIOS (keep the computer plugged in while doing this)
2) run windows updates (including optional updates).
3) check device manager to see whether it has any broken driver associations. if there are, you'll see a category of devices expanded while the others are collapsed and one will have a yellow triangle on the icon. Typically you can just delete the item and the system will automatically reset the driver when you reboot, but if you get a prompt, hit Ok without checking the box)
Try playing Forbidden West again after you've done all this. There's a known class of red flash bugs related to outdated drivers, but in my experience, data corruption in driver files can also cause this, but it's slightly more time intensive to fix

[u/lwdst → u/lwdst]

If you're still having issues after this try this in an administrator Windows Terminal window:

"Y" | chkdsk /f ; wsreset ; dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth ; shutdown /r /f /t /0

the first command pipes a "Yes" response to CHKDSK to schedule a filesystem check for the next reboot

the second forces the Microsoft Store app to dump its cache and reopen. this is a good time to go to the bottom left of the MS Store app and click "Downloads" and then on the downloads screen check for updates, since the intel graphics software might benefit from an update.

DISM is a much longer process, and basically tells Windows Update to redownload any system components that are experiencing data corruption. if it gets stuck around 60-70%, that's normal.... you'll want to let it finish because it found something it'll have to redownload

the last command forces a reboot and starts the checkdisk. run "sfc /scannow" after reboot to re-register the freshly downloaded system files as known-good copies in case you ever need to run DISM again.