Miscellaneous hardware/driver issues

[Biohazard]

Back to FAQ: LINK

Screen turning black/off randomly for seconds

This seems to primarily happen on GTX 960/970/980 (ti) hardware. Someone managed to fix it by choosing a specific PhysX GPU in the Nvidia Control Panel and not the 'auto' option (although Wallpaper Engine doesn't use PhysX). It's most likely caused by a driver or hardware fault concering the video decoder on your graphics card. LINK GOOGLE[www.google.de]

Mixing monitors with different refresh rates

Depending on hardware and operating system, your graphics card may have issues updating all of your monitors at the same time if they have wildly differing refresh rates. This is an inherent driver issue that cannot be changed by Wallpaper Engine
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Some common work-arounds:

• Set monitors to refresh rates that are a multiple of each other. For example, 120Hz and 60Hz instead of 144Hz and 60Hz.
  
• Use the iGPU for the 60Hz monitor, although this will likely decrease desktop performance overall, since your CPU now needs to make both GPUs work together!
  
• Use pausing/stopping options in Wallpaper Engine to make this less of a problem.

Compatibility problems with games

If you encounter issues while Wallpaper Engine is running and you are playing games, first make sure no unnecessary features are installed that might affect either program, like overlays, streaming or recording hooks. Remove Wallpaper Engine from those if possible. You can also set the fullscreen playback option to 'stop' which makes Wallpaper Engine unload the wallpapers while playing fullscreen.

Desktop PC with dGPU and iGPU

If you enabled the iGPU on your desktop PC in the BIOS although a dGPU is installed, you can experience bad performance and high CPU usage of DWM.exe. If possible, do not enable your integrated GPU and plug your monitors into your dedicated GPU. Using both independent graphics solutions at the same time will break hardware acceleration of the desktop window manager. Without Nvidia Optimus technology or similar, Windows will be forced to copy the wallpaper image from one GPU to the other - a slow operation. In fact any shared action between your GPUs will suffer from this, it is the same as moving a game window right between both monitors.

This is unrelated to hardware built for multi-GPU setups like Nvidia Optimus laptops or SLI/Crossfire.