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by wmf 969 days ago
Good UEFI like Surface devices is native resolution so you can have flicker-free boot. My Gigabyte motherboard recently got native resolution with a UEFI update.
2 comments

I don't understand why modeset causes flicker - fade to black, turn off screen, change resolution, turn on screen, fade to image.
"Fade to black, turn off screen, turn on screen, fade to image" is just slower flicker.
True, but that does look nicer than normal-speed flicker?
And slows boot down by a couple of seconds. As long as the firmware sets a native mode, modern OSes can just inherit that rather than performing a modeset and we just ignore the entire problem anyway.
This summer I went into an apple store, and there was this 2019 Intel Mac Pro tower hooked up to the shiny 6k XDR display. I brought up the System Settings, and set the resolution one notch towards "More Space". It faded to black and never came back.
Because most modeset protocols/implementations aren't atomic, so some frames are drawn halfway through setting the mode.

Turning off the screen can take a long time, but it is possible that putting up a "hot black" screen would be better than flicker if you had to do it.

Fancy fade in/out effects this early?
Nice to hear that good implementations exist somewhere out in the wild. I hope my AM4 and LGA1700 boards by Asus get similar updates at some point.