G-Sync Crashes Whole PC

[Middcore]

15 minutes ago, Cyberat said:

regardless of back door deals between Corpos..

 

FreeSync is an open standard Nvidia could have chosen to support at any time, and finally did. There was no "deal" required. 

 

15 minutes ago, Cyberat said:

Just like mixing CPU & GPU brands in a PC build.

 

Which is completely fine.

 

If you're going to reply to as many troubleshooting threads as you do, you should put some of these hot takes of yours in your signature or something so people can take them into account when considering your advice. 

 

15 minutes ago, Cyberat said:

A guy named Referi-Jerator asking if I am trolling ! Cool, cool, I mean real cold...

 

Because the handle "Cyberat" inspires so much more trust? 

[Cyberat]

8 minutes ago, Middcore said:

Yeah, the question was Trolling and Refrijerator beat me to it hands down, as for Middcore, it's just as trust inspiring...

Because the handle "Cyberat" inspires so much more trust? 

 

[Graymath]

Man... I just got a new Monitor with G-Sync and I was getting random crashes...

 

I have a Radeon GPU and the FreeSync were on with a second monitor and I HOPE this is the problem. My other Monitor is a no-Sync stuff on HDMI (now my 2nd screen) and I got this new one because I want to buy a geforce card in the future. The old one never crashed or anything...

 

I almost send my new monitor back... but i was like "can a monitor crashes a pc?" and got here gladly. Thanks for the information... hope this solve the problem.

[UnderPL]

Ran into a similar issue with my setup, which isn't exactly the same as the OP's but shares some frustrating symptoms. My gear includes a BenQ EX2780Q and a MSI G272QPF – the latter is officially G-Sync certified, while the BenQ isn't officially supported for G-Sync, though it usually works just fine.

Here's what happened: I enabled G-Sync on the MSI, and my system froze completely. Despite several restarts, I managed very brief moments of control, but my mouse movements were extremely jittery and lasted only a second or two before everything went unresponsive again.

Determined to find a solution, I tried various approaches, including restarting with third-party utilities and adjusting settings, but nothing worked. It became clear that G-Sync might be the issue when disconnecting the second monitor suddenly restored mouse and keyboard functionality.

As a drastic measure, I installed a new Windows on my PC, and surprisingly, G-Sync worked with both monitors. I attempted to replicate the NVIDIA control panel settings from the new installation to the old without success, even trying to export registry keys and files.

The significant difference turned out to be the monitor driver. My new installation was using a generic Windows driver for the BenQ, whereas my old setup had the specific BenQ driver. Wondering if this could be the cause, I checked BenQ's website and indeed found the custom drivers I had installed previously, likely for color accuracy purposes.

Deciding to switch back to the generic Windows driver on my old setup made all the difference. Both monitors started to work seamlessly with G-Sync enabled.

To sum up, if your G-Sync setup is causing issues and you're using multiple monitors, checking the driver situation might help. Switching to generic drivers resolved my problems. Though my scenario differs slightly from the OP's, for anyone experiencing similar screen freezing issues, this driver check could be a valuable step.

[Flaim]

On 2/15/2024 at 7:12 PM, UnderPL said:

Ran into a similar issue with my setup, which isn't exactly the same as the OP's but shares some frustrating symptoms. My gear includes a BenQ EX2780Q and a MSI G272QPF – the latter is officially G-Sync certified, while the BenQ isn't officially supported for G-Sync, though it usually works just fine.

Here's what happened: I enabled G-Sync on the MSI, and my system froze completely. Despite several restarts, I managed very brief moments of control, but my mouse movements were extremely jittery and lasted only a second or two before everything went unresponsive again.

Determined to find a solution, I tried various approaches, including restarting with third-party utilities and adjusting settings, but nothing worked. It became clear that G-Sync might be the issue when disconnecting the second monitor suddenly restored mouse and keyboard functionality.

As a drastic measure, I installed a new Windows on my PC, and surprisingly, G-Sync worked with both monitors. I attempted to replicate the NVIDIA control panel settings from the new installation to the old without success, even trying to export registry keys and files.

The significant difference turned out to be the monitor driver. My new installation was using a generic Windows driver for the BenQ, whereas my old setup had the specific BenQ driver. Wondering if this could be the cause, I checked BenQ's website and indeed found the custom drivers I had installed previously, likely for color accuracy purposes.

Deciding to switch back to the generic Windows driver on my old setup made all the difference. Both monitors started to work seamlessly with G-Sync enabled.

To sum up, if your G-Sync setup is causing issues and you're using multiple monitors, checking the driver situation might help. Switching to generic drivers resolved my problems. Though my scenario differs slightly from the OP's, for anyone experiencing similar screen freezing issues, this driver check could be a valuable step.

(tldr at the bottom. this will be basically a blogpost explaining all the steps i've taken)

you're my hero!

i thought i was going insane due to being unable to figure out what's causing my issue and you brought the driver situation into my focus.

i was having essentially the same issue as OP, but i dug a bit deeper into it.

 

background:

gsync monitor: alienware AW2521H

regular monitor: dell U2311H

 

what i noticed was that the freeze happened when the monitor engaged with gsync, i.e. when a game launched, or you tabbed into the game.

in order to make it reproducible i even wrote a test in batch starting and killing counter strike ad nauseam. that was the first success.

launching it over night triggered the freeze most of the time within 4 hours of running it. with a cycle taking 30-40 seconds you can figure out how the likelyhood of that issue is.

 

i then started experimenting with setups to trigger the issue.

just the gsync monitor alone with active gsync: no problems

gsync monitor + different kinds of monitors: freezes

gsync monitor with deactivated gsync + any other monitor: no problems

what if i change around some of the connection types? same results

what if i change around which monitor is in which port? same results

borrowed a friend's gtx1070 (in place of my 1080ti) for the set of tests. same results.

considering that the gsync monitor alone is running fine, what if i attach the regular monitor to the igpu, so the gsync monitor is the only one in the nvidia gpu?

that's when things started to become interesting: no further problems outside of having to deal with that kinda combination.

 

thinking the monitor itself was somehow broken, i went to the dell website and downloaded their driver utility for the gsync monitor, ran it and attempted all the same things. exactly the same results as before. what did i expect anyways?

welp, guess i'll have to try replacing the pcbs of the monitor with some off of ebay. didn't try that route as it would've cost me ~250€ while the "non-gsync attached to igpu" worked well enough. also, didn't make sense to me that the hw is broken, when the monitor alone runs fine, a gpu replacement does nothing and a whole system upgrade (amd 3700x -> amd 7800x3d) doesn't change anything either. that means, something anywhere in the software stack must be botched. yaaay.

tried a fresh reinstall of windows. same picture, so rolled back the backed up system image.

 

throughout the time i've been trying to google that issue with no luck. then, some time last year i found this thread. finally the first lead to me not doing something exceptionally wrong/stupid, but still unlucky, due to containing no real solution to the problem. hoping for the best, i've been looking into the thread every now and then, until last week april 6, 2024, i finally saw the update from february.

 

being certain that i had installed the driver i didnt expect much.

i loaded up the device manager, opened up the monitor collapsible and...wtf? "dell U2311H & 'generic pnp monitor'"

i was certain to have installed the driver properly.

i went back to the dell support page, attempted to download the driver utility. "there's already a copy of this file. would you like to download it anyways?"

hmm... ok, whatever. but that confirms my suspicion that i have installed it already.

launched the utility. "where would you like to extract the installer? ok. ok. ok. installation complete."

a reboot and a look at the device manager later, still the same picture: "dell U2311H & 'generic pnp monitor'"

i didn't even consider launching the tests again, due to chances for a change being basically zero.

hold on a second. is their driver installer really that garbage? let's check it by hand.

so i navigated to the folder and it does contain another .exe alongside the .inf file.

it finally clicked. their utility just extracts those files for the actual installation, without triggering that install process. it just tells you that it's supposedly done without further notice.

launched the actual driver installer, and also manually rightclicked the .inf file and pressed "install", just to avoid rebooting twice, in case that installer also didn't do what it was supposed to.

rebooted the computer and took another look at the device manager.

"HOLY HELL. 'dell U2311H & dell AW2521H'" now we're cooking.

 

switched back the monitor setup so both monitors are again connected to the gpu and ran that batch file again overnight.

the result: everything went so smooth that steam itself started having hiccups from the barrage of game launches instead of the computer locking up.

the hope rises.

ran the test for the next few days aswell to make sure it's rock solid performance, while having that test extended to log a few more bits of information: how many runs, how often have i killed steam in order to alleviate the test locking up and stuff like that. skipped on the evaluation of how fast those cycles were running tho, as dealing with timestamps and calculation is a pita in batch.

the next night: 722 cycles.

over the next day: 400-something cycles.

today, another 200-something cycles.

i have yet to see the first freeze, after having it run for roundabout 16 hours total, when it used to freeze in a timespan of 2-4 hours.

the only sour note was the one cycle i accidentally fudged with cs' launch so the resolution and window layouts freaked out. nevertheless, the pc didnt freeze and it has recovered after killing that one botched game launch.

afterwards, not a single hiccup, and of course no freezes.

 

as promised, the TL;DR:

* open device manager, nagivate to monitors.

* check that the gsync monitor is explicitly listed with the monitors name/model.

* if it is, that implies it has the proper driver installed. in that case, try UnderPL's suggestion of specifically uninstalling the driver.

* if it isn't, go to the manufacturers page, search for the driver (utility) for your gsync monitor and install it. reboot and check again.

* if it's still not listed properly, the installation did not finish, because the manufacturer is a moron and just extracted the driver without installing it. figure out where the .inf file was placed, rightclick that .inf file and press on "install" in that context menu. reboot and check again.

* if it now appeared, try your usual things that were triggering that issue. for me they were gone at this point.

* if none of that worked, you can workaround by plugging all but the gsync monitor into the igpu. not a true fix, but you won't face the issue for the time being.