Computer monitor going black when using Unity (2020)

Questions & Answers
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1

When my unity project is open, my pc monitor starts going completely black randomly.

Most of the time it turns black then back on after a few seconds and sometimes it shows a “No signal” message and just stays black. I gotta hit winkey+ctrl+shift+b then spam the alt+tab to turn it back on.

Doesn’t happen with any other app/game, just with Unity.

Any fix for this?

Geforce GTX 1050 Ti - Intel i3-9100f

2

Yep, same deal… like it can’t handle the Editor now or something…crashing the graphics out now an then.

3

I started having that issue once I switched to Nvidia Studio Drivers

4

I have the same problem on Unity 2022.3.37. Random white lines appear on the screen randomly, and the monitor goes balck with increasing frequency the longer I keep the editor open. Eventually it just stays black, just like the author said.
This only happens with game engines ( Unity, Unreal, Godot).
I have a Geforce RTX 1050 Ti too.

5

That seems like a driver issue and is not related to Unity / Game Engines.

This will generally happen with any low-intensity 3d-app, most likely because the driver is switching between power states that are not properly supported by your GPU.

You should use a driver cleaner tool (like DDU) to uninstall all drivers from your system. Perform a few restarts after fully removing all drivers, or completely remove Windows and reinstall everything.

Then you can try to download the exact driver from your mainboard vendor / laptop vendor that will support your GPU + Mainboard combination.

You can also use Windows Update, but usually those are more “generic” drivers that don’t support Laptops / Specific Builds.

Other possible reasons for those black screens:

  • You have a bad PSU, either a cheap power supply or a defect one (quite common with cheap priced ones). Some PSUs allow different power supply modes - you can switch them to try if one works better than the other
  • You have an undersized PSU - not enough power can be provided. You need to calculate your power usage based on all compents and add 50-100% so you can handle spikes
  • Your GPU or CPU or other components are running too hot - you can easily check this with tool like hwinfo. Your GPU should always remain below 85 degrees, your CPU should remain below 90 degrees. Anything above is excessive and can lead to issues such as black screens or artifacts (more prominent)

You should check if there are any error in the Windows Reliability Monitor:

  • You could find you have issues related to your RAM, GPU, CPU or drivers

You should take this as a learning experience to find out more about how your computer works, and what things might be broken. This is part of the basic skills of any developer! :slight_smile: