Nvidia Gsync broken on 50 series GPUs with more than 2 monitors

[sas41]

I’ve upgraded from a 2070 Super to a 5080 earlier this year, around March/April, after I’ve had some issues with a 7900 XTX and display blackouts and driver restarts. The 5080 has been a lot more stable with my workloads, but VRR would only work in Exclusive Fullscreen. I decided to wait out the driver shitshow Nvidia has been going thru but alas, months later, there’s nothing on the horizon.

I have effectively exhausted all my options, I’ve tried every driver since the launch of the 50 series (w/ DDU), every combination of settings, and only tried unplugging a monitor this week.

To my surprise, GSync finally worked in windowed applications properly, in fact, unplugging either of my side monitors fixes the issue and with this knowledge I found a thread with other’s who experience this issue.

The thread has no official replies, and I doubt I will get a reply in the driver feedback thread, so I wanted to ask if anyone else has similar issues or suggestions on fixing it.

[xyz]

To the best of my knowledge there isn’t much you can do as of right now. Nvidia has largely been resting on their laurels with this and many other driver issues. Your best is to verify all Nvidia control panel setting are correct and that G-sync is being properly detected all across all monitors within it. I’d also make sure you have known good display cables as well.

I went to a 7900XTX and have had almost no issues so far, however, I’m fully on Linux now. So that could play into my general lack of driver issues.

[sas41]

Okay, quick update for anyone who is struggling with this issue, I managed to get Gsync to work with three monitors, but I won’t call it a fix, because nobody should have to do this to get Gsync to work, it worked without this workaround before and Nvidia should fix their drivers.

My setup:
1x 1440p 155hz Freesync (Gsync compatible) main monitor.
2x 1080p monitors on left and right of my main monitor.

Here’s what I know:
Gsync does work in exclusive fullscreen applications, even with three (or more?) monitors.
Gsync does not work in windowed mode applications with three or more monitors.
Gsync works in windowed mode applications IF I unplug at least one monitor, doesn’t matter which.

The Workaround:
So I experimented with resolutions and refresh rates and eventually I enabled “DSR - Factors” in the “Manage 3D settings” menu of the Nvidia Control Panel.
In my case, I wanted good integer scaling so I enabled 4x factor and set “DSR - Smoothness” to 0%, I then switched to “Change resolution” and set my side monitors to 4K resolution and then in the Wndows Display Settings, set the Scaling to 200%, which effectively restored my resolution to 1080p.

This fixed Gsync, I can see my monitor reporting variable refresh rates as well as Counter-Strike 2 report Gsync as on in Borderless Fullscreen, which in the past, it did not.

So now the ball is in Nvidia’s court, this was working fine on my 2070 Super and on the 7900 XTX, there’s no reason why it should not work now, I left feedback on their forums, but I reckon it’ll fall on deaf ears.

UPDATE: This fixes it for a while, after some time it stops working again, no clue what causes it, but restarting the PC fixes it.