Plot Lines Displaying As Black (Plus Gradient?)

I recently installed R2016a after having to replace my hard drive. Since then, every plot I draw comes out with what at first glance appear to be black lines, but on closer inspection appear to have a slight color gradient on them

For example, the following code:

    x = linspace(0,2*pi,100);
    y = sin(x);
    figure
    plot(x,y)

generates the following figure:

This happens when I plot multiple series, too - even if I try and override the default color order. Legends display the correct colors, but the data series in the figure don't. The following image uses this color order command:

set(gcf,'DefaultAxesColorOrder', [0 0 1; 1 0 0; 0 0.5 0; 0 0.75 0])

Both of these worked correctly on older versions of MATLAB, including most recently R2015b (on the old hard drive on this computer).

I can't find anything in the Preferences dialogue that would affect this. Can anyone offer any advice on how to fix it? I have a conference coming up, and I need to make these figures presentable.

Answer 1

[Andrew Mizener]

MATLAB support helped to fix the the problem, if not understand the cause. Running the command

opengl software

fixes it, and plots display normally.

Answer 2

[Aaron Powers]

I agree, that sounds funny! Have you tried in a freshly restarted MATLAB, and check to make sure you haven't added anything to the path? For example, you might want to make sure you don't have an "startup.m" that's adding anything to your path that might be affecting this.

[Andrew Mizener]

I'll look into it, thanks.

Answer 3

[Mike Garrity]

Any chance this is an Intel GPU? That looks a lot like a bug we've seen in one of their recent driver updates.

If so, there are a couple of options.

• Try installing a different version of the graphics driver. I'm afraid I don't remember the # of the bad one.
• As Andrew said, switching to the software OpenGL implementation.
• Keeping hardware opengl, but disabling the shaders using this command:

opengl hardwarebasic

Previous versions of MATLAB didn't user shaders much, so they are less prone to hitting this bug.