M17xR4 680m/3D - BLACK SCREEN nvidia driver updates after 353.06

So had been running 344.75 for the longest time until Star Wars Battlefront Beta prompted a minimum version of 355.60 to run.

Checked on nvidia and found 358.50 to be the latest release that provided support for the Beta.

During installation, when the new drivers are installed, normally the screen will black out and then light right back up and the install would complete. Well the screen turned black and stayed black. Only way to bring image back up is to plug in another display via hdmi for a few seconds and unplugging. This would return image back to screen.

So I downloaded all the available drivers 347.88 to 358.50 and installed each one to see which was the last working driver before the screen started blacking out.

Narrowed it down to 353.06 as the last working driver. All six newer drivers after 353.06 blacks out the screen requiring a 2nd display to be plugged in and unplugged to bring image back. Sure that appears to be the workaround to get the image back.. but I'm not always going to have a 2nd display sitting around to plug/unplug.. lol

So currently I've had to downgrade back to 353.06 so my screen works without the whole plugging/unplugging nonsense..

Anyone else experiencing this issue? Thanks in advance

 

Hi, I've seen that problem a few times over the years with different hardware including my AW. I found that since it appears that when the new driver loads it fails to detect the panel correctly, if I just left the machine for 5 mins or so, until the disk access died down, then hard reset, the machine worked fine and the new driver was installed.

It was not consistent like you though, if I re-run the install after the reset it would work. I never tried an external monitor so I can't say if that would have made any difference?

So, when you restart on the new driver you get a black screen every time until you connect an external monitor? That sucks but I have found that when a game prompts for a later driver I have been able to continue just fine. Does SW Battlefront not allow you to do this?

 

Thanks for the input! Yea the black screen issue is consistently occurring with all drivers after 353.06

The drivers would finish installing with black screen. By plugging/unplugging a 2nd display, the image would return and it would show drivers successfully installed. However even with soft/hard restarts, after bios loads & the windows startup logo shows, the screen goes black. Plugging/unplugging the 2nd display would bring up the windows login screen. It seems these drivers, like you said, aren't detecting the display until I force detection by removing the 2nd display..

Star Wars Battlefront runs fine on the newer drivers... once u get past the black screen on start up.. lol

 

Grabbing at straws now but what happens if you run a clean install with the external monitor active/ both active? Does the internal/external hot key have any effect when the display blanks (wait a few seconds between presses)?

You could try a DDU strip out and fresh install of the latest driver but it seems a little extreme...

 

i got black screens with win 10 and latest drivers. viewing the event log showed that the GPU kept crashing and recovering - probably from trying to detect the display maybe?

 

By the way the 680M has been a no brainer with a Win 7 system in the past and even with the 3D LCD (but if broken like the last one I got - see my other thread on this forum).
I currently have a 970M + W10 Pro on my M17xR4 3D - and for sure I lost the 3D - but I managed to get the screen working even in 120Hz (but hardly ). I definitely get the feeling recent nVidia drivers are just unreliable (at best) with W10 and LCD 120Hz combo.

Just for your information I have currently issues in my last configuration (970M again) when using external monitor by HDMI (not recognized when booting with 353.67 but going ok if I unplug and plug, sometimes few times). On the other hand things are going fine when I use the mini-display connector... again very strange behaviour .
Also I had quite bad experiences with stuck black screen when making trial with other drivers so I am becoming very paranoïd when one start to talk to change my current driver (which is not 100% bullet proof but not a serial killer). Thank you nVidia and Microsoft for all that stress !

 

thanks for the suggestion, tried doing a clean install with 2nd display on duplicate/extend.. no luck, same results.. oh well i guess stuck on the desktop to play Star Wars for the moment

 

Did you try leaving it there for a while as suggested above?

 

This might be weird, but I've had an issue where the screen either is black, or loads in 640x480.

The solution for me was to hit Fn+F6 then enter. For some reason my laptop would load as it detecting it was a projector and not display on the main screen.

No idea if you are having the same problem. I just updated drivers and it worked fine aftewards. I was using a non-compatible GPU, so one newer than the R4 takes, required special drivers.

 

thanks for the suggestion. i've tried hitting fn+f6 to try to cycle through displays. no luck. only way to bring video back is to plug in that 2nd display. this immediately causes the system to detect the laptop screen. don't need to actually press fn+f6 to switch or anything. just plugging in that 2nd display returns the video.

 

hi yea i left it there for awhile. black screen. plugged in a 2nd display (don't need to press anything), video returns to laptop screen and i see the nvidia window stating driver successfully updated. reboot. black screen. fn+f6 nothing. plug in 2nd display. voila video! back to 353.06...

 

You can refer to below video for another workaround



The trick is press the power button and let windows sleep and wake up again.

No need for the external display.

 

thanks for the tip naruto kun! unfortunately i've already tried that and it doesn't work in my case..

HOWEVER..

i just updated to the latest drivers released yesterday 361.43 that works!

thanks for the suggestions from everyone