w11: odd behaviour when exiting 3d game

Hi,

Please see below gif that shows the weird "focus" behaviour that happens when i exit a game.. it only happens in windows 11, anyone know how to get rid of it as its really f@cking annoying..

• AMD 5950x
• Nvidia 3080FE (latest drivers)

The first black screen is me switching back into the game, the focus rubbish is when i exit (close) the game. this is one a triple screen thus you dont see the game.

Ive tried 3 different drivers from Nvidia and that doesnt affect it, using windows 10 with the same drivers doesn’t have the same issue. all default settings.

I have dual monitors, one that is 4K and the other that is 1440p, and I have this any time the 1440p either gets manually refreshed or I power it off and on - regardless of going into / out of games or not. That last little focus loss at the end of the video is exactly what I see happen - and I can reproduce it 100% of the time by simply powering off the 1440p at any given moment.

Do you have G-Sync on for the nVidia driver and / or Freesync enabled in the AMD drivers? Try turning those off (temporarily, just to test) to see if that helps. I really suspect that variable refresh rates may account for some of this, as the driver noticed that you're in game and kicks freesync / G-Sync into high gear - but across all monitors connected to the GPU, regardless of their use in-game or not.

johnlgalt said:

I have dual monitors, one that is 4K and the other that is 1440p, and I have this any time the 1440p either gets manually refreshed or I power it off and on - regardless of going into / out of games or not. That last little focus loss at the end of the video is exactly what I see happen - and I can reproduce it 100% of the time by simply powering off the 1440p at any given moment.

Do you have G-Sync on for the nVidia driver and / or Freesync enabled in the AMD drivers? Try turning those off (temporarily, just to test) to see if that helps. I really suspect that variable refresh rates may account for some of this, as the driver noticed that you're in game and kicks freesync / G-Sync into high gear - but across all monitors connected to the GPU, regardless of their use in-game or not.

Click to expand...

Thank you!

I didnt think about a second screen i have duplicating screen one, that i use for online racing but rarely use... as soon as i unplugged it, the issue went away!

Hi, just picking this issue back up as im using my simrig more...

Does anyone know how i can stoop this behaviour happening?

johnlgalt said:

I have dual monitors, one that is 4K and the other that is 1440p, and I have this any time the 1440p either gets manually refreshed or I power it off and on - regardless of going into / out of games or not. That last little focus loss at the end of the video is exactly what I see happen - and I can reproduce it 100% of the time by simply powering off the 1440p at any given moment.

Do you have G-Sync on for the nVidia driver and / or Freesync enabled in the AMD drivers? Try turning those off (temporarily, just to test) to see if that helps. I really suspect that variable refresh rates may account for some of this, as the driver noticed that you're in game and kicks freesync / G-Sync into high gear - but across all monitors connected to the GPU, regardless of their use in-game or not.

Click to expand...

Interestingly i dont get it like you do, im only seeing it when im going in and out of 3D applications (games)

Odd. Mine always occur with multiple monitors and if I add or remove one or more.

I've now got a 3x 4K + 1x 2K (in vertical mode) setup. If I turn any of those on (or off if all are on) I see what you see.

But I Have not been seeing that when gaming, because I game on my primary 4K monitor, and use 4K res in games. Are you using native resolution in your games? That is the other way I can absolutely trigger it every time, to use non-native resolution.

And it's always gonna happen when Windows runs at one res and your games run at another. It's how Windows 11 resets the resolution moving between 2 different resolutions.

Heck, if you go into Windows Settings and change the resolution of your monitor in Windows itself, it almost always does the same thing as well.

Yeah im running Native resolution (1080p) on all my monitors, i only have this occur on the screen that is mirrored from my primary display.

Hmmm. Perhaps it is the mirroring process itself, since Windows 11 is handling that, that also leads to this. I'd have to set my monitors up to replicate your setup as much as possible (obviously I don't have a simrig though I do love racing games, so it would be limited to mimicking your display mirroring setup) before I could verify that, though.

These interruptions caused by (I'm assuming) The WDDM v3 in Windows 11 are annoying, but at the same time, I understand that it is a much more graceful way to maintain usability than in older OSs, where a connected display would go offline and yet your computer still thinks it is there - and your mouse will go to it, you can accidentally interact with items on it, and at the same time cannot see any items that were on it before it dropped.

At least with Windows 11, it's gotten good enough to re-factor everything when things get added or removed.

whats the actual feature called thats doing this?

Uh, tbh, I'm not 100% sure, but since it happens in a variety of scenarios, I'd venture it is either WDDM 3.0 related, or else directly baked in to Windows 11.

Its definitely mirroring, if i set the display to just be another extended display, i dont get the same "focus change" behaviour.

Yeah, that makes sense. But it's odd that playing a game at 1080p on a 1080p monitor causes that.

daNutz said:

Its definitely mirroring, if i set the display to just be another extended display, i dont get the same "focus change" behaviour.

Click to expand...

Just had a thought - since you're mirroring, you could try changing the display in the simrig to be the primary display, and then try playing without mirroring, and see if it still occurs or not.

That would at least help ascertain if it is the mirroring itself, or the game setup / Windows 11 in general that is at the root cause.

johnlgalt said:

Just had a thought - since you're mirroring, you could try changing the display in the simrig to be the primary display, and then try playing without mirroring, and see if it still occurs or not.

That would at least help ascertain if it is the mirroring itself, or the game setup / Windows 11 in general that is at the root cause.

Click to expand...

If the Simrig display is set as primary with no mirroring then the issue doesnt occur.

I have noticed the same behaviour when im change display settings in general, IE extending displays and such

daNutz said:

I have noticed the same behaviour when im change display settings in general, IE extending displays and such

Click to expand...

And that is more like my own experience. Adding a new monitor to the chain causes this to occur without fail - even when all 3 monitors are not only the same brand but also the same resolution (same model, so...)

Still struggling to find out windows setting what is causing this

Only thing I can think of is if you're also using DLSS / FX Fidelity to upscale, which may contribute to the issue.

FWIW - based upon my own experience, it's not a Windows 'setting' that can be turned off, it is the Windows 11 system itself. If you load a game into full resolution that you are using on Windows, it won't do that. If it loads anything other than what the windows in Windows 11 is using, it will do either of those 2 things in the video.

Like I said - on games using the same native resolution of the monitor, I don't see it (monitors connected via DP 1.4). But if I ever turn on any of the monitors that are not on, or I turn off any monitors that are on, I see the second part every single time.

If I enter a game that is using a lower resolution than 4K (3840 * 2160), which is what Windows is using, I see either the first or the second (usually the first when entering game, and second when exiting).

Also, I've found that some monitors prefer to have custom (nVidia) color settings in the nVidia Control Panel, and I used to change the resolution settings to custom for all 4 of my monitors (32 bit / 10 bit / RGB / Full) but as of early this year I stopped doing that and let it use the default settings, as that is also what shows (though grayed out) anyway, so I figure I'm not getting any benefit. The above wonky behavior continues regardless of that change, though.

One thing you could try messing with (after researching how to change the values) is the desktop size and position, specifically the Scaling, as I don't generally do that but my monitor actually supports on-device integer scaling, and that *might* make a difference with these causes.

FWIW - all my monitors are Eve Devices (now called Dough Tech) Spectrums (now called something slightly different), three 4K plus one 2K.