Dealing with the output weirdness on Nvidia cards

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StoleMyOwnCar

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I've found that Nvidia cards are weird about what outputs they selectively turn on and off, and which ones they automatically detect, and I'm wondering if you folks know any way to manage it.


To further elaborate, I'll add a few anecdotal cases:

  1. On my current 980 Ti I decided to make sure the rest of the outputs were working fine, aside from the HDMI (projector), 2xDVI (Qnix, HP), and 1xDP (RoG Swift) ports I was using at the time. When I plugged in my RoG Swift into one of the other two DP port connectors, it would not work. I thought the board was faulty and was sadly about to return it... but then I had some ideas. I unplugged everything and plugged in just one DP->HDMI adapter monitor into each of the remaining displayport connectors at a time... and restarted. It worked. Then I tried connecting stuff to the DVI ports again, but they wouldn't work now. My RoG Swift seemed to only work in the DP connector that I initially had it on when I first installed the GPU into my MB.

    That tells me that not only does it limit the amount of outputs that are turned on at any one time, but that some will not work in conjunction. And worse yet, sometimes this sticks throughout boots, and even in the BIOS. If I had chosen any other DP connector, I would have likely declared the card as having a faulty DVI output when in reality it was just selectively turning it off! One time it was even fine at the UEFI but then stopped displaying at the windows startup. That tells me part of this is hardware related and part of this is software related; the card seems to have some internal memory of what it turned off and what it didn't...
    \n
  2. So I had two 780's that I was using in SLI with the exact same setup before I got this card. I put one 780 in a friend's computer, but the DP connector would just refuse to work. Thinking it was the card, I swapped it out for my other one. That one was the top card, and had the ROG Swift hooked into it, so I knew it had to work... yet it didn't. Again, same deal. To rule out the possibility of the monitor DP port being faulty (or at least make it less likely), I used a DP to HDMI cable and encountered the same scenario. Everything but the displayport connector was working with the new monitor. I'm not even sure what to do about this case. I found a thread that may help somewhere, but it's a bit of a long shot. Of course it's possible that somehow in the extremely short time both of the GPU's were out of my computer, the DP ports somehow got fried in both of them... I guess...
    \n
  3. This is probably unrelated, but I was playing Diablo 3 once on my 780 SLI combo. I wanted to put it into Windowed fullscreen, but I think Flux (this is a screen color temperature modification program) was messing with it. Long story short all the screens were displaying black. Thinking I had to restart, I did... and then none of the screens would display anything, even in the BIOS. When the Qnix alone was hooked in, it was literally displaying test patterns on the screen (yeah wtf I know). This persisted through bootups. Eventually what I had to do was hook a monitor into the other card in the SLI combo. That actually worked, although everything moved at a crawling pace and was a mess of stuttering (yes the mouse was having period hangs). Afterwards, I nuked the drivers with DDU and then reinstalled the Nvidia drivers and finally after a reboot everything was working again. I just find it bizarre that a game can mess up a card so bad that it persists through bootups.

Honestly the Diablo 3 experience was probably the biggest wtf, but this topic is mostly regarding the first two cases.
 
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I've seen similar issues on my 980.

I have two monitors, an older DVI and a new DP - it always initializes the DVI first, which is somewhat annoying but livable - windows at least can re-assign the DP monitor as the primary.

The annoying part is since Windows 10, every time I reboot, and most of the time I wake from sleep, the DP monitor gets re-detected as some basic 640x480 monitor and won't correct until I unplug the DP cord, let it "disconnect" the hardware, then replug it back in and let it re-detect.

That part is very annoying.

I haven't found any work arounds that are usable yet - but I'm hoping someone else posts something useful here.
 
@ Brian_B: Try resetting your mobo bios, and set your displays up again connecting one at a time. Wake/restart issue, could be a sleep setting in your monitor osd.
 
Your setup is a little unusual with the Qnix / Swift / projector. Those qnix have no scalers or something I think? I only messed around with OC'ing one for grins at work briefly.

Just speaking for myself (sorry about the threadjack) but I only give advice backed by personal experience.
 
Well the second anecdote is kind of one that I would like some help with at least. I want to get the GPU I gave my friend to have the DP connector working, but I'm not sure what's going on with it. Like I said, I took it out maybe just a week ago and before I did my RoG Swift was working on that DP connector just fine, but in his machine it doesn't... on both cards.

As far as my setup... I guess it is a bit unusual, but the basic problem is how Nvidia seems to turn off connectors and you can't ever really tell how to turn them on...
 
If it's a Gigabyte card, see this:
flex_display.png


Basically you can have only one of those two combinations simultaneously so all ports cannot be used at the same time.
 
When I first got my XB270HU, it would re-detect every morning after being turned off overnight. Then, that stopped. I don't know. Maybe just from fresh driver installation at some point.
 
I get other strangenesses on my 980ti. It was no better on my old 290x, quite a bit worse, so I'm not too displeased.

I have 3 display devices connected.
Monitor (DVI to HDMI), AV processor (direct HDMI) and projector (DP to HDMI).
When all 3 are connected it will only POST on my monitor but all 3 can be used in Windows.
If I unplug the monitors lead it will POST on the other outputs.
Annoying if I have to make any BIOS changes when using the projector.


In Windows, if I tell the driver to mirror the display on all 3 devices when DSR is enabled, 9 times out of 10 it will not let me open the NVidia control panel again after I have closed it.
And if it does open, resolutions will not appear in control panel (or in game options). The NVidia resolutions page gives me a blank box.
Rebooting doesnt help, neither does different drivers, they all behave the same.

To fix it I use the Windows tool to change back to one display or 2 displays mirrored then open NVidia control panel.
Then change back to 3 mirrored and dont close NVidia control panel, this seems to work most times after the settings are freshly changed.
OR
I mirror the 2 displays and Extend to the AV Processor, this makes it behave much better but the mouse pops off the left side of the screen. Not a problem as long as I remember it happens otherwise I think something ate the mouse cursor.

Flippin muti screen nuttiness.
 
I have a CRT with two LCDs on the side. The LCDs always come on first. I guess nVidia starts digital output before analog.
 
kasakka said:
If it's a Gigabyte card, see this:
<snip>

Basically you can have only one of those two combinations simultaneously so all ports cannot be used at the same time.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that would definitely explain some of the stuff with my 980 Ti... although even if I consider that, sometimes it behaved weird. Like posting on the other two DP ports, but refusing to then actually use those ports in Windows.

There is also the case of my the 780 that I gave to my friend, where neither of them would post or use the DP connector in Windows. =| I think I found a post about that somewhere, though. It involved doing some registry hacking and then messing around in Device Manager in order to manually kill off displays and then get Windows' plug and play to detect them again.

I'll link that forum thread if I can find it.
 
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