One monitor in a 3 monitor setup wakes to black screen others are OK

I have a triple monitor setup, each of them kinda different from the others.
Primary is 27" 2K 144Hz Samsung on Display Port
Secondary is 27" 2K 60Hz Acer on Display Port
Tertiary is 20" 1600x1200 60Hz Viewsonic on HDMI with DVI adapter.

Video card is EVGA 3060Ti and OS is Windows 10.

As of this weekend, when waking the monitors, the Acer and Viewsonic come back just fine. The Samsung wakes up, as indicated by the blue power LED and I can see the backlights, but the screen remains black.



Things I've tried that haven't worked and have lead me to post here:
I've disabled all of the power saving options other than the monitors going to sleep after 30 minutes. I may just disable this but my preference would be to keep it if I can't figure it out otherwise.
I tried swapping to one of the other display port outputs.
I also removed the Viewsonic and tried the Samsung on the HDMI.
I updated the drivers. I've since reverted as nvidia now apparently uses an "app" instead of the control panel.

Things I've not tried but may be effective:
Waiting for the next phase of the moon.

Has anyone else experienced something similar or have any ideas?

swap the two display ports and if it still happens the monitor is probably crapping out.

I've had a similar incidents with triple and dual monitor setups and switched to HDMI and or alternate inputs on the bad monitor which resolved it. A couple years ago on an Asus which still works fine on the alternate input. If it were my primary I would have replaced it as it stands when it finally goes out the next one will be my primary.

I have 2 Dell 24" IPS touchscreen monitors as secondary displays connected via DisplayPort on my and my wife's PCs respectively (systems 1 and 2 in signature block). My primary display is a 65" LG OLED TV and hers is a Samsung Odyssey G5, both using HDMI. The Dells work perfectly fine until the screens idle to sleep, and then they won't wake up. Neither Dell will recover from sleep on those systems, using either (Kubuntu 26.04) Linux or Windows (11). Temp fixes include: prevent the screens from sleeping, OR to reboot the computer after it happens, OR to unplug and re-plug in the DisplayPort cable. The fix was just to connect the Dells to the onboard AMD CPU video, which is what I have now. Oddly this does not happen on Intel and older AMD Vega and Polaris cards.

I'm just saying, man. Sometimes these things are just... weird.

Bonus Weird: On my Kubuntu-running machine, if I start a Handbrake encode queue for some overnight encoding, lock the computer, AND turn off the TV then after a while (few minutes to an hour or more) Handbrake will crash and take out most of the Plasma KDE desktop with it. I'm talking almost every running service just... gone and only a COLD boot fixes it. A warm reboot goes to an emergency recovery boot text screen login because the video card will not reinit. After the cold boot, Linux gives me about 40 notifications covering every service that crashed. I've only EVER have this happen under these specific circumstances. The fix for this one? Unplug the HDMI cable so that only the Dell monitor is connected if I am going to do overnight Handbrake encodes.

If you havne't tried these things, (if running windows OS that is) - they sometimes work with screens handshaking with the gpu, and they can also reset HDR if it's not engaging on a game (leaving the game looking "grey", washed out, when HDR is enabled)

SHIFT + CTRL + WIN + B ...

. It reloads the video driver and resets the desktop window manager, which helps fix frozen screens, black displays, or visual glitches without rebooting your computer.

What Happens When You Use It

• • Screen Flash: Your display will turn black or flicker for one to two seconds.
  • Audio Beep: You will hear a short beep sound if your PC audio is not muted.
  • App Safety: Open apps and games stay open, though intensive media tools might stutter briefly.

When to Use This Shortcut

• • Your computer screen freezes or stops responding.
  • You get a sudden black or blank screen.
  • Colors look strange or graphics glitch out.
  • External monitors or laptop displays fail to wake properly

Click to expand...

. . .

I had a problem where even that would not work to reset the HDR in elden ring after my new pc build was done a while back and I wanted to mess around in elden ring again, and I stumbled upon a thread showing that a utility included in CRU edit would reset everything on an even lower level. I was aware of the CRU edit app but I never thought to use that restart64.exe. It really seems to reboot the gpu/graphics driver more fully overall if nothing else works (SHIFT+CTRL+WIN+B didn't work for my elden ring issue).

restart64.exe

ignore the CRU.exe editing info in the quote, you just need to double-click the restart64 exe

restart64.exe is a companion tool included with the Custom Resolution Utility (CRU). It restarts the graphics driver on 64-bit Windows systems so you can apply new monitor resolutions or refresh rates without fully rebooting your PC.

How to Use restart64.exe

• • Open the folder where you extracted CRU.
  • Make your changes inside CRU.exe and click OK.
  • Double-click restart64.exe to reload the graphics driver and apply the settings.
  • Your screen will flicker or go black for a few seconds as the driver restarts.

Fixing Issues with CRU

• • If you get a black screen or softlock your monitor after running restart64.exe, restart your PC into Safe Mode.
  • Open your CRU folder and run reset-all.exe to clear out the custom display overrides.
  • Reboot your computer normally to restore your default display settings.
  • Alternatively, use the built-in Windows shortcut Win + Ctrl + Shift + B to force-reload your graphics driver at any time.

Click to expand...

. . . .

I keep the CTRL+SHIFT+WIN+B hotkey on one of my stream deck buttons so that I can hit it at any time easily. I haven't linked a streamdeck button to a restart64.exe shortcut yet but I could do that eventually.

I'd try CTRL+SHIFT+WIN+B, that usually works if one of my screens rarely doesn't want to wake up or loses signal.

. . . .

Another thing people might try for HDR issues that might help with some other bugginess between displays:

.. setting display scaling in nvidia control panel to aspect ratio , perform on GPU, check the box "override the scaling mode set by games and programs"

. . .

You can also go into the windows HDR panel and turn the hdr on and off for different screens, even those that don't have HDR (turning hdr on briefly and then back off). That sometimes shuffles things up.

. . .

Thanks for all the input. However, I think the Samsung has croaked. Having it as the only connected monitor and it never shows anything other than a black screen. I can't even get the on screen display to show up by pressing the button.

frank b said:

Thanks for all the input. However, I think the Samsung has croaked. Having it as the only connected monitor and it never shows anything other than a black screen. I can't even get the on screen display to show up by pressing the button.

Click to expand...

Sounds like it. If it won't show anything at all when you poke the buttons that's not a good sign. You should at least be able to get it to show a message complaining about not having a signal. If it just wouldn't display output from the PC but you could get some sort of built-in menu poking the buttons I'd say try a different monitor input & vid card output, like switch to HDMI, but it sounds like it's just plain dead.

I'm not sure what's going on here.

As I am notoriously cheap, I was willing to spend some more time messing around with the monitor before spending money on new.
Within the nvidia control panel if I set the Samsung to 60Hz, disable the monitor, and then re-enable it, I can get it back. It seems to sometimes auto set itself back to 144Hz and sometimes I have to do it manually with in the nvidia control panel.

Some internet search results suggest this may be a "handshake" issue. I don't understand what that means other than the different refresh rates are an issue. I would think the ctrl+shift+windows+b reload would help and/or solve it, but it does not. For now I'm disabling sleep mode so I don't have to do the hokey pokey every time I want to game. I'll probably also update to latest drivers and come to terms with the app.

frank b said:

I'm not sure what's going on here.

As I am notoriously cheap, I was willing to spend some more time messing around with the monitor before spending money on new.
Within the nvidia control panel if I set the Samsung to 60Hz, disable the monitor, and then re-enable it, I can get it back. It seems to sometimes auto set itself back to 144Hz and sometimes I have to do it manually with in the nvidia control panel.

Some internet search results suggest this may be a "handshake" issue. I don't understand what that means other than the different refresh rates are an issue. I would think the ctrl+shift+windows+b reload would help and/or solve it, but it does not. For now I'm disabling sleep mode so I don't have to do the hokey pokey every time I want to game. I'll probably also update to latest drivers and come to terms with the app.

Click to expand...

I use that shortcut if one of my side monitors ever loses signal. It happens only occasionally when I turn them all on at first (I turn them all off with a remote when I'm leaving). I ended up mapping that CTRL+SHIFT+WIN+B shortcut to a streamdeck button to make it even easier to do whenever it comes up

. . .

The washed out HDR in Elden Ring would not reset using that shortcut or anything else. I found a reddit reply stating that the restart64.exe included in CRU edit download (custom resolution utilitiy) would work because it does a more full reset. When I tried that, it worked like a charm. It definitely looked more like a "reboot" than the momentary time-out black screen the CTRL+SHIFT+WIN+B does.


. .

I would try setting the display scaling options like I listed in my previous reply, since your mix of different Hz could be part of the issue like you described. Display scaling on the gpu might help with the mismatched Hz. If what I outlined specifically doesn't work, I'd try other scaling options (e.g. not scaling the 144hz one and scaling the other screens, scaling all, none, etc.).

This was the suggestion , on all three displays:

elvn said:

setting display scaling in nvidia control panel to aspect ratio , perform on GPU, check the box "override the scaling mode set by games and programs"

Click to expand...

. .

The other thing people usually suggest, much like "Have you tried turning it off an on again" , is to swap to a new high quality cable. Even if your existing cable was good and working, they theoretically can degrade over time.

You can also try swapping cables around on the gpu ports and rebuild your array (move the monitors around in the display settings since you swapped which ports they are on on the gpu).
. .

I can't say what's up with your specific screen, and like pendragon said, worst case, it might be on the way out, potentially, worst case.

. .

Depending on the specs of the monitor it might be worth trying the HDMI port. Ampere has HDMI 2.1, so that's no problem. If the monitor has at least HDMI 2.0 it should be able to run at a full 144Hz refresh over HDMI at 1440p.