Black screens when starting games in fullscreen on 144 Hz (DisplayPort)

[zinned]

When starting games (being it something resource intensive (Hell Blade) or not (Gato Roboto)) in fullscreen on 144 Hz connected via DisplayPort I'm getting a black screen at first.

When I Alt + Tab out and back in, it goes away (and sometimes comes right back at me and I have to repeat the procedure a few times). Afterwards I can play normally whithout this phenomenon reappearing.

I can rule out the cable because I never had this on my former Eizo (60 Hz), both are 24" with 1080p.

I use the latest game ready drivers (457.51 2020-12-02).

[old_geekster]

@zinned , welcome to the forum.

The first thing that comes to mind when I see this type of problem is that the games need to be patched.  I realize that this will happen automatically on Steam or other such sites.  The developers are releasing games so quickly these days that they are certainly not perfect.  They use us as Beta Testers and correct the problems when we complain enough on their websites.

[zinned]

Thanks for the warm welcome @Old_geekster.

I would agree if I hadn't tried a lot of games. And whenever I switch to fullscreen in the options or start a game from within an ingame menu the screen goes black after a second when I Alt+Tab back in.

For some games (e.g. Bloodstained or Diablo) I even have to

1. Alt+Tab to Windows
2. Go to display settings and switch back to 60 Hz and revert it back again to 144 Hz
3. Alt+Tab back to the game and surprisingly it's "fixed"

As it's happening with nearly any title I don't think it's (game) software related. It's tightly connected to the 144 Hz mode of the screen though.

[old_geekster]

You are very welcome, @zinned!

One other thought!  Do you have Freesync enabled?  It may be interfering with the 144 Hz.  I have read that some users have reported this anomaly.

[zinned]

I'm using an Nvidia GTX 1070 so I don't have the AMD drivers for Freesync installed.

I also haven't (yet) switched the viewing mode in the OSD.

[zinned]

The recurrent black screens in full screen games are still bugging me so I've resorted to a workaround following parts of this reddit post.

hpbug.bat

I'm still baffled by the issue. More so as switching the refresh rate back and forth is working around the problem.

[old_geekster · Accepted solution]

@zinned, I agree that this type of problem is baffling!  The only thing that I can come up with is there is a glitch with another driver.

Please delete your duplicate post!

[zinned]

I think you were spot on @Old_geekster!

Just as I gave it up and put the workaround in the start menu for easy access I've tried to manually run the update check in Windows. I gave it a shot and updated to the feature update version 20H2.

Afterwards I've just tried some games and the issue was gone. I don't trust it a 100% yet, but it seems solid 😊

EDIT: Apparently it's still going black on some games unfortunately. Good thing I've got the workaround.

PS I've flagged my post as a duplicate for the mods. Had some trouble with the picture upload in .png format... Thanks for pointing it out.

[zinned]

I needed to answer once more @Old_geekster!

I've never thought that it might help but I've looked for the drivers provided by my mainboard manufacturer. Although BIOS drivers were current, both network and audio drivers were quite outdated (and Windows didn't bother updating them).

After updating them manually (including two reboots because of the audio driver) now every game works like a charm.

So it seems for some games the drivers were interfering in a very-hard-to-predict way: network and audio usually aren't expected to influence black screens on the display, are they?

Thanks again and enjoy your holidays!

[old_geekster]

You are very welcome, @zinned!

You are correct!  Drivers can cause problems that you wouldn't suspect.  This is why as a last resort I mentioned the conflict.