Wallpaper Engine locking up entire PC. Read Post.

[Heatnixx]

Computer:
RTX 2070 Super
Ryzen 3700x
32GB DDR4 at 3200mhz
M.2 SSD
1KW PSU
Windows 10.

Attempted Fixes: Updating drivers many times, updating BIOS, changing XMP profile, updating Chipset, using AMD power plans, updating Windows, reinstalling Windows (I have not tried reinstalling with a different version of Windows 10)

I have used Wallpaper Engine for 2 years now, and my PC would occasionally lock up entirely. The PC would start slowly freezing up at first, able to move mouse but apps would slowly begin to lock up over the course of 2 or so minutes.
Open windows would behave normally but slowly lock up one by one until the entire PC froze and I have to forcefully reboot it. The biggest giveaway this is happening is because Wallpaper Engine's wallpapers simply freeze up.

The problem on Windows Event Log is always reported as a "Hardware Error", then pointing towards the NVidia display driver being the fault. This issue would happen maybe once every month so it never really bothered me.

Recently it began happening a lot more often, happening up to 3 times in the span of 24 hours, which led me to finally find out what's happening. Wallpaper Engine settings are somehow crashing the entire PC when running 2 monitors.
My first monitor is 144hz and I use for gaming, while my secondary monitor at 60hz is often turned off and I only turn it on (through Windows keyboard shortcut) when I have use of it, such as photo editing.

I often leave my Wallpaper Engine running at 144FPS, the refresh rate of my main gaming monitor. Both monitors function fine until I let the computer idle. Once the computer reaches the stipulated idle time to turn off the monitors on the power plan settings (or sleep, if the main monitor is left playing a full screen video for hours) Windows will slowly begin to go through the process I described before, becoming completely frozen and needing to be manually rebooted.

This issue can be avoided entirely by either:
A- Disabling Idle/Sleep in Power settings.
B- Turning off secondary monitor before idling
C- Setting Wallpaper Engine to a lower FPS.
D- Closing Wallpaper Engine entirely.

The issue can be delayed by weeks, if not months, if Wallpaper Engine FPS is set higher than 50, but will happen randomly regardless. Setting it to 30FPS or below seems to "fix" the issue entirely. So far it seems the only reliable fix for a smoother wallpaper experience is to instead turn off the secondary monitor when not in use.

Regardless of Windows reporting it as "Hardware Error" the system is otherwise completely stable and since it being built (Early 2020), it has matched and often exceeded expected benchmarks results of similar hardware, temperature and performance wise. Gaming has no issues whatsoever and the PC has been used for server hosting before.

My PC is often left running for months without ever being turned off and the system is otherwise completely stable. Setting Wallpaper Engine to 144FPS and leaving it to idle with both monitors on easily reproduces the issue within hours.

[Biohazard]

Please share this log and perhaps we can give you suggestions on what you could try to do: https://help.wallpaperengine.io/debug/scantool.html

Windows is not good at handling monitors with different refresh rates, it can force it to adjust the refresh rates on the fly when one monitor needs to be refreshed, and the idle/sleep functions are also not reliable inherently. Personally I never use them because I always have a couple of windows open and sometimes the graphics driver violently resizes and repositions my windows after turning off the displays or entering hibernation.

Wallpaper Engine has an option to shut off while the displays are turned off, so this might help.

The FPS setting is really nothing else than what you would expect, it's just an FPS limit. In general the program only does what is absolutely necessary in order to work, especially with scene and video type wallpapers, it doesn't interact with the graphics driver or system in any way besides what is necessary to display an animation.

[Heatnixx]

Originally posted by Biohazard:

Please share this log and perhaps we can give you suggestions on what you could try to do: https://help.wallpaperengine.io/debug/scantool.html

Windows is not good at handling monitors with different refresh rates, it can force it to adjust the refresh rates on the fly when one monitor needs to be refreshed, and the idle/sleep functions are also not reliable inherently. Personally I never use them because I always have a couple of windows open and sometimes the graphics driver violently resizes and repositions my windows after turning off the displays or entering hibernation.

Wallpaper Engine has an option to shut off while the displays are turned off, so this might help.

The FPS setting is really nothing else than what you would expect, it's just an FPS limit. In general the program only does what is absolutely necessary in order to work, especially with scene and video type wallpapers, it doesn't interact with the graphics driver or system in any way besides what is necessary to display an animation.

Sent the email with the required file. It seems like for whatever reason increasing the FPS on Wallpaper Engine makes the system unstable. It does make wallpapers a lot smoother on the 144hz monitor, but the tradeoff doesn't seem worth it.

As for the refresh rate, that is something I am well aware of, Vsync in many games simply refuse to work properly in Borderless mode if both monitors are on, with the FPS fluctuating between 72FPS (half the main monitor's refresh rate) and 60.

As for the display options, that doesn't seem to be the issue. What seems to happen is that Windows will begin to lock up instead of turning off the monitor, with the odds of it happening increasing the higher I set Wallpaper Engine's FPS limit. As a matter of fact the only reason I even put 2 and 2 together is simply because after throughout googling for the issue, I found a thread on Wallpaper Engine's subreddit with the exact same problem I was having, and sure enough closing Wallpaper Engine seems to have fixed the issue entirely.
Mind you it still works perfectly fine when only one monitor is turned on, it just becomes a gamble when both monitors are running, which seems to be like NVidia driver is just unsure of what's happening and crashes without recovering.

Lastly I should add that both monitors are also of different resolution and brand, so surely that must also be contributing to the overall mess that is Windows and multi monitor setups.

Editing to add picture of GPU temp and clocks. Left being Current Value, Middle being Min and Right being Max value recorded on HWMonitor after running Cyberpunk for a bit.
https://i.gyazo.com/e040729d25f5d276c3ec0227645264c1.png

[Biohazard]

Thanks. If the issue is occurring right at the time the monitor turns off, then perhaps the event for this hasn't even propagated to the application yet. It looks like you already set this option to "stop" which is what I was suggesting, but if the issue occurs before Windows sends the respective event then it wouldn't help.

Does the issue occur at all if you set both monitors to 60Hz? If it doesn't happen then, this is at least something that could be reported to Nvidia because it may be precise enough for them to fix.

Your Nvidia driver is also several months old so you could try updating it and also using the "clean installation" option in their installer just to be on the safe side.

Do you have HWMonitor running at all times or was it just now when testing? If yes, could you check if the issue occurs when this is not running? Since it's tighter integrated with drivers it could just increase the chance of something odd happening, but I assume you just had it running now coincidentally so in that case you don't have to test this of course.

I don't see anything else, besides that driver crashes have been logged. Hopefully updating the driver will help, but if not I fear that only Nvidia could really resolve this. Shutting off the wallpaper beforehand would be the only workaround I could think off, but the app already supports this and is unfortunately at the mercy of how and when Windows sends the respective events.

[Heatnixx]

Originally posted by Biohazard:

Thanks. If the issue is occurring right at the time the monitor turns off, then perhaps the event for this hasn't even propagated to the application yet. It looks like you already set this option to "stop" which is what I was suggesting, but if the issue occurs before Windows sends the respective event then it wouldn't help.

Does the issue occur at all if you set both monitors to 60Hz? If it doesn't happen then, this is at least something that could be reported to Nvidia because it may be precise enough for them to fix.

Your Nvidia driver is also several months old so you could try updating it and also using the "clean installation" option in their installer just to be on the safe side.

Do you have HWMonitor running at all times or was it just now when testing? If yes, could you check if the issue occurs when this is not running? Since it's tighter integrated with drivers it could just increase the chance of something odd happening, but I assume you just had it running now coincidentally so in that case you don't have to test this of course.

I don't see anything else, besides that driver crashes have been logged. Hopefully updating the driver will help, but if not I fear that only Nvidia could really resolve this. Shutting off the wallpaper beforehand would be the only workaround I could think off, but the app already supports this and is unfortunately at the mercy of how and when Windows sends the respective events.

I have not tried setting the frequency of both monitors to Hz, I shall attempt that. I think I will just keep Wallpaper Engine running on primary monitor and disable it entirely for secondary monitor, should hopefully fix the issue.

As stated before, I have gone through many different driver versions, so whatever this issue is, is not something that they broke recently. I have suspected before it's a driver issue, and I suspect it might have to do with uneven display frequencies and the higher FPS simply causing the GPU to not idle properly.
Weirdly enough, it does seem to be a rather specific issue since it never happens while the PC is in use, rather while it's attempting to idle, which leads me to think any 3D application making use of both monitors simultaneously might cause the exact same crash to happen.

As for HWMonitor, I keep it open from time to time, usually when leaving the PC running overnight when I install/replace hardware, in this case replaced the factory Wraith Prism with a new CPU cooler, but I've also had crashes where it's not running.