Monitor Turns Off During / Shortly Following Cut Scenes

[Demiskus]

Greetings,

I created a thread earlier this morning but somebody I believe mistakenly moved my thread out of this section and into the "Separate Support Required" section along with many other off topic threads. I cannot update anything in my thread in that section for some reason. I've read the sticky descriptions and believe this is the appropriate area. Please excuse the repost but understand why.

First post but long time FF player. I've been trying to figure out this issue for many months and now I'm reaching out for help. I can't figure out what in the world is causing this problem.


Problem:
I notice this problem specifically during end game dungeon opening cut scenes only. When I first enter a dungeon (CT, hard modes, coil, primals) I typically skip the opening cut scene. I will skip the scene successfully and I'll be able to see everyone in the starting area. There is about a 1/3 chance that after a few seconds my monitor will appear to lose power. It will not come back on for anywhere from 3 to 90 seconds. During this time I can verify that my game/computer is not frozen via watching my wife's screen when she is in the dungeon with me. I can type and move around but I cannot see anything.

There isn't anything that I'm aware of that will restore my display (I've tried alt + tab and every other button I can think of). When the display comes back on, the rest of the dungeon is fine. No other boss kill cut scenes or anything else that happens in the dungeon appear to trigger this condition. The only other time I've noticed this is during some of the main story cut scenes and the cut scene when riding the airship between towns triggered it a few times. I have not seen this occur during any of the low level dungeons, but then again, I do a heck of a lot more end game dungeons and it doesn't happen every time.

I've not experienced this problem in any other game.


What I've tried:
I first thought it was a hardware issue. I suspected either my power supply or video card. I upgraded both. I have a CX750 watt PSU and a 2GB Geforce GTX 760 GPU now. Both should be way overpowered for this game. I checked various other computer settings. I disabled monitor sleep entirely. I've had no luck so far. Just before posting this I checked for windows 7 updates (no major updates were missed) and I re-installed the latest directX (I'm pretty sure I had the latest, but maybe not). I've messed with various in game settings. This problem happens whether I'm on maximum graphic settings or the lowest. My computers hardware is better than the wife's and she's had no problems. I'm guessing it's got to be some compatibility problem or something I'm overlooking.

My system specs:
OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
System Model XPS 8300
System Type x64-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3401 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date Dell Inc. A03, 2/15/2011
SMBIOS Version 2.6
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 12.0 GB
Total Physical Memory 12.0 GB
Available Physical Memory 9.88 GB
Total Virtual Memory 24.0 GB
Available Virtual Memory 21.2 GB
Page File Space 12.0 GB


If there's anyone that has any idea what could possibly be going on I would love to hear from you. Many thanks.

[Raist]

Sounds like something may be tripping up the "ultra low power" 2D mode when the cut scene is triggered or something? ATI had issues with this a while back with specific drivers and streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Other people with the Optimus setups were experiencing something similar where the system was trying to flip over to the Intel Graphics for video and then having to flip back to the PCI-E card for 3D support.

Might want to take a look at what GPU and driver version is on the other system and see if that driver release will work on your PC (provided it is using nVidia also). Worth a shot I guess. If you do this though, make sure to do a thorough safe-mode scrub of your existing drivers to avoid any strange mismatching of DLL's and such (should always do this anyway). You can find a tool to do it for you over at guru3d.com, as well as archived drivers.

Another thought... what cables are you guys using between your monitors? Wonder if maybe there isn't a poor signal or something on one of the wires that is causing the monitor to think it's time to go on standby or something weird like that. Might be interesting to see what happens if you were to swap cables... or maybe even swapping the monitors to see if it's something systemic with your PC or something with the interface to the monitor (or the monitor itself) having issues. May find it behaves differently if using a different interface entirely (HDMI vs. DVI vs. VGA)? If it is only via HDMI,there might be something like a bugfix WDM driver specifically for the HDMI bridge (had to do this once for my old ATI 4800 cards).

[Demiskus]

Thanks very much for the thoughts Raist.

I will swap both cables and monitors and give it a few days of testing and see where that goes. Being intermittent it could be up to a week before I see it fail again. I have some stuff going on this weekend that'll keep me from the game. I'll be sure to report back any findings though and stay tuned in for any other ideas. It's kind of a weird one.

[Demiskus]

Update 1:
Confirmed it is either the monitor or the DVI monitor cable that is causing this issue. I swapped both monitor and cables and the problem followed. Swapped just the cables back and I'm awaiting another failure. It's just weird to me that it would only trigger at very specific times. Either way I'm crossing my fingers for just a stupid cable lol.

[Squa11_Leonhart]

Are you using a gamepad?

If you are, open a video in WMP or whatever player you use and pause it, then play through the game. - This effectively disables monitor power saving features.
Other Square titles are affected (JC2, Sleeping dogs) by this when using a gamepad for play.