Started getting desktop screen tearing and overexposed colors since hooking up a second display

durrburger · May 16, 2021

Not really sure if I should post this here or the GPU section but here's the problem. I'm using the Sony x900f TV as a monitor with a 1080 Ti, and today I hooked up another monitor as a secondary screen over DP, but now that I've reverted back to the TV and unplugged the second monitor I started getting screen tearing on the desktop and all colors look overexposed, like a fake reshade preset or something. I'm not sure if this caused the problem but nothing else happened in between. What might have been the problem is that one display was 4k60 and the other was 1440p75hz. I can't take a picture of the issue as I have no reference of how it was before, and it's subtle but still visible and annoying.

Everything gets brighter than it should be and bright colors are clipping, it's visible even with desktop folder icons. There is a visible shift in colors/contrast or whatever is changing that happens at random. Another problem which also might be the same thing, is that when running games in HDR, when that "shift" happens, HDR either gets a purple sheen to it or contrast is all wrong and blacks are crushed with a lot of color banding. Whites get a purple hue and it just looks bad.

I also started getting screen tearing while scrolling through websites with hardware acceleration off, which I've never had before. I've had HA disabled when I'm running Nicehash occassionally as hardware accelaration on Chrome/Edge uses enough resources to affect the speeds, but I've never had tearing prior to today. I've since reinstalled drivers with DDU with 2 different driver versions but am still getting the same thing. I also tried a different HDMI cable, plugging back only the monitor again via DP, and all the problems persist. Any ideas on what's happening? Did my GPU start dying all of a sudden?