There are a lot of things that have stumped me about why a computer would behave oddly for no apparent reason over the years… but this one deserve an award.
I have 3 monitors. Sometimes, when I want to watch a movie or play an immersive game in the dark, I turn 2 of them off. Recently, I upgraded my computer and this involved reinstalling Windows (specifically Win10 Home). Now, for some reason, whenever I turn a monitor off, everything will freeze for half a second every two seconds. Precisely and repeatedly. Two normal seconds pass, half second of screen freeze, repeat. I thought it was just my pen sensitive, art display (my 3rd monitor), because I don’t have the driver for that installed yet, but it does it if I only turn off my 2nd monitor too (which is just a normal monitor/no touch functionality). Turning the monitor back on immediately fixes the issue.
I just updated my drivers and the problem didn’t go away. I installed the driver for the art monitor and it didn’t go away. If anyone has ever heard of something so weird happening, any fix would be appreciated.
My system is:
Ryzen 2700x (what I had upgraded to)
My old RX480 GPU (just finished updating drivers as I said)
Interesting. I don’t usually turn my monitors off but this is what happened to me on Win10 Enterprise:
Display one is mini displayport
Display two is vga
Turn off display one, no pause, screen still used by graphics.
Turn on display one, no signal.
Disconnect and reconnect display one cable, display one gets recognized, display two gets no signal.
Power off and on display two, display two comes back up.
Not sure if this helps you out or not, but definitely proves Windows is stupid.
This is rather peculiar. Are you shutting off just the display, or are you turning the monitors off in software?
Because as far as I know, just turning off the display via the power switch SHOULDN’T affect anything to do with the GPU. All it should be looking for is resistance on the wires to know if the cable is connected to something. Hell, I can take an old CRT I have, leave it unplugged from the wall, plug in the monitor cable and the computer will still detect that I connected a new display. AFIK it shouldn’t matter if the display is on or off…
How have you implemented your multi monitor? Is it stretched? Sometimes Windows can nominate a primary monitor that you dont expect it to. When the nominated primary is turned off, Win will lag/stutter as it reconfigures itself to switch to a new primary.
I still don’t understand how Windows is knowing if the monitor is on or off. It shouldn’t matter unless something has physically changed in the way monitors are detected nowadays. Is that what it is?
@brewkro Here’s what I don’t get though; I didn’t have this problem before upgrading the system. And I had the most recent driver version on the old build before I upgraded.
Kind of a weird question, but when you did the install, did you set up a new USB/CD iso copy of Windows 10? (Not using one from say, last year or a couple months ago?)
I had similar and other odd issues with the OS- I discovered the built-in updates (on newer versions of the image) had worked better and fixed issues like the one you just described. Running the patch from previous to the current version caused this for me, among a bunch of other issues with speed and performance.
Just a thought, maybe not helpful at all, but something to consider.
Have you tried to reproduce the issue with just two monitors installed? Among these, are you sure the cable connector is a full dual link DVI-I (not a DVI-D?) This typically isn’t a factor but more for general questioning.
Last, do you have a DVI cable of that type?
The lag doesn’t happen if I turn off monitor 1 (DVI-D). Just if I turn off 2 or 3 (HDMI). Weeeeiiiirrrrd
The issue persists regardless of setup. I have made it to where 2 and 3 mirror 1 and the lag still persists if 2 or 3 are turned off. Various other configurations… always lag so long as 2 and 3 are active at all and then manually turned off on the monitor.
I just… how could turning the power off to the monitor itself cause this? Makes zero sense.
I don’t know if this will help but i had a similar problem after a windows update around the time you made the op. Every now and then i would get 1 fps on the desktop for 5-10 seconds then it would go back to normal.
long story short i uninstalled my drivers with ddu then reinstalled them and it fixed it.
Another strange development: Updated drivers… again… testing legginess again. Lagginess still happens, but stops after about 10 seconds of that cycle I described. Now works fine after I wait for 10 seconds.
Among these, are you sure the cable connector is a full dual link DVI-I (not a DVI-D?) This typically isn’t a factor but more for general questioning.