Ok, first, the full system specs:
Dell XPS 8700:
Now, I'm generally not on the latest and greatest games. I've been playing Pinball Arcade, and Don't Starve mostly. The latter, I've actually been playing on my Athlon 200GE based Micro Machine for the most part. The Dell I've specced out above, I do a lot of web browsing, watching videos, and keeping files (spreadsheets, banking and budgeting stuff, etc, as I still use Excel from Office 2013)
Two weeks ago, I fired up the Dell to play Pinball Arcade (the Micro Machine is Linux, and Pinball Arcade doesn't seem to work through Steam Proton). No problems, but I play that in windowed mode.
Then I played Don't Starve. It got weird. Every once in a while, the screen would go completely blank for about 2 seconds, and then come back. Everything else kept running, sound, action in the game, etc, just the screen would go blank, and come back. There was no regularity to it - sometimes it was as little as 2 minutes between blackouts, and sometimes as much as 15 minutes, and various durations in between.
This past weekend, I tried again. No problems with web-browsing, or playing Pinball Arcade windowed. Played some Don't Starve, and same issues as two weeks earlier. So, I downloaded GPU-Z for the speed/temp/fan/gpu graphics, and tried again. Same symptoms
Wondering if maybe there was some bug in a recent update for the game, I decided to try another non-demanding game: Portal. Settings were high, but not max, and I played.
The symptoms were the same - the screen would go blank at irregular intervals, but only for about 2 seconds. No freezing, no crashing, everything else going as normal. Also, there was no loss of signal, as had there been, the monitor would've tried cycling through the other inputs, which didn't happen.
After about an hour or so of playing Portal, things got a bit odder. I noticed that the game was jittering/shuddering at points, and Steam's frame counter was showing it fluctuating at various values between44 and 48 (EDIT: actually, in hindsight, I'm fairly certain between only 47-48, without dipping lower than 47). There's no way the GPU should be struggling.
When I'd check the GPU-Z graphs, there were no spikes in utilization, temperature, fan speeds, or anything, so there was no thermal throttling going on. I checked the Windows logs in the Event Viewer, and there were no issues logged at the times that the blanking occurred, or even close to those times.
I further tried the following:
A friend at work suggested re-checking the PCIe connection (I'll give that a go tonight), as well as maybe replacing the PCIe modular cable with another one, though I'm dubious on those as I assume the system would probably crash if a brief loss of PCIe cable power was at issue.
It only happens in full screen, never when I'm doing anything on the Windows desktop. I haven't tried Portal or Don't Starve windowed, nor have I tried Pinball Arcade at full screen, though.
Thoughts or suggestions? Are there any steps I've missed? Any further diagnostics I can do? Or is the card actually going?
Dell XPS 8700:
- Windows 10 Professional
- i5-4460
- Nvidia Founders Edition GTX 1080
- 4x4GB Patriot Viper 3 DDR3 1600 CL9
- 500GB Samsung 860 EVO SATA 2.5" SSD
- 500GB Crucial MX500 SATA 2.5" SSD
- 1TB HDD
- Seasonic Focus Plus SSR-650PX Fully Modular 650W 80+ Platinum PSU
- Acer XR382CQK 38" 3840x1600 IPS, 48-75 FreeSync
Now, I'm generally not on the latest and greatest games. I've been playing Pinball Arcade, and Don't Starve mostly. The latter, I've actually been playing on my Athlon 200GE based Micro Machine for the most part. The Dell I've specced out above, I do a lot of web browsing, watching videos, and keeping files (spreadsheets, banking and budgeting stuff, etc, as I still use Excel from Office 2013)
Two weeks ago, I fired up the Dell to play Pinball Arcade (the Micro Machine is Linux, and Pinball Arcade doesn't seem to work through Steam Proton). No problems, but I play that in windowed mode.
Then I played Don't Starve. It got weird. Every once in a while, the screen would go completely blank for about 2 seconds, and then come back. Everything else kept running, sound, action in the game, etc, just the screen would go blank, and come back. There was no regularity to it - sometimes it was as little as 2 minutes between blackouts, and sometimes as much as 15 minutes, and various durations in between.
This past weekend, I tried again. No problems with web-browsing, or playing Pinball Arcade windowed. Played some Don't Starve, and same issues as two weeks earlier. So, I downloaded GPU-Z for the speed/temp/fan/gpu graphics, and tried again. Same symptoms
Wondering if maybe there was some bug in a recent update for the game, I decided to try another non-demanding game: Portal. Settings were high, but not max, and I played.
The symptoms were the same - the screen would go blank at irregular intervals, but only for about 2 seconds. No freezing, no crashing, everything else going as normal. Also, there was no loss of signal, as had there been, the monitor would've tried cycling through the other inputs, which didn't happen.
After about an hour or so of playing Portal, things got a bit odder. I noticed that the game was jittering/shuddering at points, and Steam's frame counter was showing it fluctuating at various values between
When I'd check the GPU-Z graphs, there were no spikes in utilization, temperature, fan speeds, or anything, so there was no thermal throttling going on. I checked the Windows logs in the Event Viewer, and there were no issues logged at the times that the blanking occurred, or even close to those times.
I further tried the following:
- Updated to the latest drivers (I was maybe 2 or 3 versions behind originally)
- Switching to a different DP cable
- Switching to different DP outputs on the same card
A friend at work suggested re-checking the PCIe connection (I'll give that a go tonight), as well as maybe replacing the PCIe modular cable with another one, though I'm dubious on those as I assume the system would probably crash if a brief loss of PCIe cable power was at issue.
It only happens in full screen, never when I'm doing anything on the Windows desktop. I haven't tried Portal or Don't Starve windowed, nor have I tried Pinball Arcade at full screen, though.
Thoughts or suggestions? Are there any steps I've missed? Any further diagnostics I can do? Or is the card actually going?
Last edited: