Nvidia drivers 560.70, 560.81 and 560.94 freezes screen switching to dGPU

[Kantana]

I'm using a ROG Strix 18 2023, G834JY with RTX 4090.  All latest bios and updates from Asus applied.  The last 3 Nvidia driver releases will freeze the screen requiring a hard reboot when the notebook changes ot the dGPU whether invoked automatically when starting a game or manually selected.  Last working driver is 556.12.

Anybody else facing the same issues or have a workaround?

@Anbby_ROG @Silent_Scone Can you escalate this to Nvidia so they fix this in their future driver releases?

[SciGhost]

A bit of an issue with the latest drivers and what I am experiencing:

Laptop: Asus Scar 18 2023.
External Monitor1: Alienware aw3423dwf connected via DisplayPort to USB-C/Thunderbolt 4. Native 165hz.
External Monitor 2: LG 27ul500 4k connected with hdmi. Native 60hz.

DGPU mode enabled.
Windows 11 Enterprise up-to-date.
All firmware and other drivers up to date.

Behavior with driver 556.12:
Turning the monitor on or off functions as normal, including changing HDR modes with the computer running or restarting. No black screen, no flickering. Works flawlessly.

Behavior with drivers 560.70, 560.81 and now 560.94:
Turning on the external Monitors before starting the PC works fine. Turning off and on the monitor when the system is running or switching between HDR modes causes a loss of signal/blackscreen on all monitors including the laptop display. The only way to recover is a hard reboot. Setting GPU/CPU scaling as per the instructions did not resolve the issue. Thus it seems there was a change to how scaling works or the way it interprets the connection or hz of the monitor in the latest batch of drivers.

This has been posted on the Nvidia forums and reddit.
So hopefully someone else is either experiencing the issue or knows a possible workaround. 

[SciGhost]

I had similar issues and I managed to fix it can you believe it!
It was a combination of Nvidia / Intel Drivers and the Asus Armory Crate.

How I did it:
Used DDU in Safe mode, removed not only the Nvidia Driver but also the Intel Display Driver.
Reset Armory Crate back to factory defaults.
Reset Bios to Defaults and then booted into normal mode.
Setup Armory Crate for Dedicated GPU mode and my custom Fan mode with CPU and GPU settings.
Fresh install both Intel and Nvidia drivers to the latest versions.
Re-applied my resolutions and bit depth for all 3 screens.
Re-applied color profiles for all monitors and HDR profile for the Alienware monitor.
Rebooted laptop.
Plugged in and unplugged one monitor at a time, all working all settings kept.
Plugged in all three and and it worked fine.
Closed and opened laptop lid with one monitor, worked fine.
Closed and opened laptop lid with both monitors plugged in and it worked fine as well.
Seems my issues have been resolved.
Thank you for the assistance here, its much appreciated!

[Kantana]

Thanks, tried this but same results, screen freezes after selecting the dGPU.  I noticed after hard reboot it will sometimes show as Optimus instead of automatic select.

For now falling back to 556.12.

[norius]

I have the same problem, sometimes the laptop gets stuck when entering the game (auto select mode) either in the black screen or in the opening scene. I even formatted it but it didn't fix it. i think it might be mux suich

[Kantana]

I only had this problem with the 560.70, 560.81 amd 560.94 drivers.  Try running 556.12 driver or earlier which was working fine for me.

[norius]

yes problem solved. i thought it was asus but it was nvidia driver. how can we report this problem to nvidia? they optimized for the new wukong game but i can't update the driver because of this problem.

[Kantana]

You can report to Nvidia on their feedback thread:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/548393/geforce-grd-56094-feedback-...

I'm unsure if it is an Asus unique issue hence posted it here.

[Animefreak1983]

I was having same issue. Disabled armory crate and did a reinstall then reenabled armory and seems to be fixed.

[Kantana]

How did you disable armory crate while you reinstall thr drivers?