Question Video on one Monitor sometimes goes very red.

[Wh1ppet]

I would like to know what is causing this issue and how to troubleshoot it as I can't find any pattern associated to when it happens as sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, even under similar situations and when it starts doing it, I can't figure out how to stop it from doing it till I have gone a period of time without anything but the desktop using the GPU and then it might happen next time the conditions are met.

I have an NVidia 3060ti with Win11 and two monitors. What monitors they are doesn't matter as I have had this happen with a Spectra Ultra Wide as my primary and very old Viewsonic as my secondary monitor and am currently having it happen with a new CRUA ultra low latency gaming monitor as my primary and a new Hisense Smart TV as my secondary monitor. In both cases the primary is running by Display Port and the Secondary is connected by HDMI. Now the situations that might cause this is either running a game on the primary while trying to play video on the second monitor or streaming videos on both monitors at the same time. When it happens, everything will appear normal on the primary monitor but any video playing on the secondary monitor and only videos that are playing will go extremely saturated in red. Everything else on the monitor will look normal and the video when paused will look normal but if a video is playing, it pretty much turns red. This is extremely annoying when it happens and I just want to know how to prevent if from happening.

I will already throw out the answer to the question I expect to be asked: No, they are not running at the same refresh rate. In both cases, the primary is running at a much higher refresh rate than the secondary monitor. With the first setup it was 144hz and 120hz and with the current setup it is 180hz and 30hz and 30hz is all the Smart TV will run at in 4k.

 

[helpstar]

which video player are you using?
while the video is red, what happens if you move the window to the other monitor? does it look right then?

 

[Wh1ppet]

Any video player. It's usually chrome from a website, but playing videos on a local player or using Edge instead makes no difference. It even affects embedded videos in games. Pretty much, if it's streaming video, it is affected.

And switching it to the primary monitor fixes the color problem. I can even drag a video so it's split half and half in the monitors and the part in the primary monitor will look normal while the one in the secondary monitor will look mostly red. And it ONLY affects the streaming video, so anything that isn't streaming around it will look the same in both monitors.

 

[COLGeek]

Let's rule out some basic things.

Does this happen with only a single display attached?

Have you swapped video cables and/or ports to see if that helps?

What are your GPU operating temperatures at idle and under load?

What are the complete specs for this system (make/model of all installed components)?

 

[Wh1ppet]

No, only happens on the 2nd monitor when 2 are attached. Have no option to change anything about the connection. Not the same cable between the two monitors so not the cable (would be hard to understand why only part of a picture was affected if it was the cable) but the 3060ti has only 1 HDMI port to run it out of and the 2nd monitor(s) lack a display port but can only be connected by HDMI.

Temperature is not a factor because it can happen when the machine is running at pretty much any temperature and though the machine gets noisy when it's generating a lot of heat, it doesn't get hot and when the GPU is under low load, the fans on this machine (graphics card and system fans) stop completely and the only sound is a very slow, soft tick of the liquid coolant pump for the CPU running very slowly. It takes me actually playing games or the temperature in my apartment going over 90f before the fans even turn on and when on, and the temps are always cool on the GPU and warm on the CPU but the Ryzen 7 in it is supposed to run a little hot.

As far as system, it is a stock HP Omen 30L with a liquid cooled Ryzen 5800x, 32gigs of RAM, 2 1G SSDs and the 8G 3060ti it came with. And the drivers are kept pretty close to up to date and this has been happening through multiple driver updates for the GPU. Only change I've made to the system is adding one of the SSDs and it was happening occasionally before I added it.

 

[COLGeek]

Do you have access to another GPU?

 

[Wh1ppet]

Maybe... I have a few but only one recent enough to bother messing with and not sure it works. I have a 7 year old AMD card that is very overclocked, but the machine it's in stopped working shortly before I got the current machine and couldn't figure out what failed in that machine, so the GPU might be part of it's no longer working.

 

[Andy that has problems]

I’m sorry to ask. But any chance night mode is on 100% or little less. I remember wondering that aswell why my monitor was turning red, turned out to be nightmode sometimes it turned on and sometimes off .It’s a bit outside of the technical side but worth a try. However do you mind taking a screenshot on when it happens? If it doesnt show take a picture via your phone cause it’s pretty hard knowing how it really looks like when it turns red Also if i missed something feel free to tell me.

 

[COLGeek]

Maybe... I have a few but only one recent enough to bother messing with and not sure it works. I have a 7 year old AMD card that is very overclocked, but the machine it's in stopped working shortly before I got the current machine and couldn't figure out what failed in that machine, so the GPU might be part of it's no longer working.

Try swapping GPUs then. Good way to potentially isolate the issue.

 

[Wh1ppet]

Two problems.

First, I already know that this graphics card never had this problem in it's original system it was installed in. Nor did the laptop that used the same GPU. I'm positive it's a problem in the graphics card whether it's a hardware issue that comes and goes or a driver issue. It's not going to make clear which it is being a completely different GPU with different drivers and thus not contribute to any knowledge that would help prevent it.

Second, there is no Displayport output on that card at all so it would be changing the way that it is hooked up which could also affect the problem.

It is clearly not the software displaying the video as it happens across multiple items. It's not what display codex is being used because vary as well. It's probably not windows causing it or the CPU unless it's some weird toggle that is being flipped in the video settings for a 2nd monitor. It is also not the general graphics as a whole. This leads me to believe with a 95% certainty it's either hardware in the card that produces the video signal, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me because I don't know why it be inconsistent and only occasionally happen if it is hardware, or it is a persistent problem in the drivers that has not been fixed in the past 2 years. A hardware problem I'm not sure can be fixed without replacing the card, which might happen in the next year depending on finances. A Driver problem might have a work around as I've had long time persistent driver problems in the past that there were work arounds for, like one for my 700 series MVidia card that would sometimes not display textures on 3d models but just solid grey or green polygons with shading that could be worked around by adjusting the shading settings. That problem there was a solution I could find online by searching the symptoms, though. This one I can't find anything about a condition like this that ONLY affects the streaming video portions and the fixes for whole screen occasional red saturation problems I can find don't make any differences.