Drop down menus are black boxes

[Vis'Nil]

I seem to in the last month have developed an issue with the steam client where all my drop down menus, such as changing my online status to away or invisible, all that displays is a black box. funny thing is the black box work, E.G. changing status, so the menu is half working but all it shows is a black box which makes navigating to friend profiles or opening chats or etc etc nearly impossible as it's a guessing game that i'm playing from memory.

[Vis'Nil]

can some one help me with this?

[CHORZORD]

I think I'm in the same situation as yours, the temporary fix that I do is closing Steam completely in the hidden icons menu and then opening it back up. Usually, it happens after my PC wakes up from sleep mode. Still bugged as of now.

[RiO]

Originally posted by CHORZORD:

I think I'm in the same situation as yours, the temporary fix that I do is closing Steam completely in the hidden icons menu and then opening it back up. Usually, it happens after my PC wakes up from sleep mode. Still bugged as of now.

Those black boxes are there because the GPU rendering context that the dropdowns use has been released by the driver. If the application tries to continue to use it, it doesn't crash - it just gets back a zero-d out chunk of bytes. I.e. black.

That rendering context can be prematurely released under multiple conditions.
One of them is a (partial) driver crash or hang and the Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) emergency mechanism kicking in to perform a (partial) driver reset. (TDR was originally invented to prevent full hangs from leaving users with non-interactive desktop environments. But since then drivers got pretty smart about resetting only the 'stuck' parts.)

The system going into sleep or hibernate and powering down the video card, is another reason.

In both cases, the application receives messages from the Windows OS that tell it the GPU driver has been reset or has been reinitialized after resuming from sleep. But it has to handle those and accordingly recreate new rendering contexts.

Chromium itself nominally does do that correctly. But if you embedded Chromium via e.g. CEF then things get complicated because of how Chromium is no longer the top-level application capable of managing its own window and its own rendering contexts. The embedding application needs to handle part of the workload.

And Valve doesn't handle all of it correctly. Which isn't exactly a new issue: they never handled it correctly. Not since the first versions of the Steam client that started embedding Chromium. Look back through the forums for all the bug reports and complaints of black screen problems. 80-90% of those are due to these type of rendering context problems. These span literal decades. One of the longest ongoing problems with Steam and one that will likely never be fully fixed.

[Redspike]

Outstanding explanation, RIO! Thank you! (and may this serve as a bump in the unlikely event a valve dev reads it). +1 user suffering this bug.

[GSC]

Same, latest public release of the steam client. I hate it. Thanks for the explanation, RiO

[Klous]

Here's a workaround.

I only see this issue if both of the following are true.

1) Using Multiple monitors
2) Windows is configured in power options to turn off the display after a set time. It seems I see this issue after windows has powered off the display and I've come back to my PC and Windows has powered back on the display.

What this means is if I have a single monitor OR if I configure windows to not power off the monitors the issue doesn't happen.

Workarounds:

1) Use a single monitor

or

2) In power options disable turning off the monitor.

Start -> Control Panel -> Power Options
Change Plan Settings
Turn off the display: Never

You can then configure a screensaver to protect the monitor. I use blank

[sirup]

same bug

[Dexter]

super annoying, valve pls fix

[Xenopotamus]

This bug is so annoying, it plagues the player experience multiple times a day. I too am on a multiple monitor setup, and like most... allow Windows to turn off my display after some time. Please fix this Valve.

[PJthePlayer]

Same issue here - and not having the monitor power off when idle is not an option (nor should it need to be) since I have an OLED primary display. Valve really needs to fix this - there are posts about it over 2 years old at this point.

[Marineford]

upgraded my main monitor to a 4k OLED and now i have that issue aswell, this is ass

[sudo]

Been having this issue for as long as I can remember. Really wish Steam would fix, or at least acknowledge this serious issue with the interface of their software.

[Mikelesi]

Same issue here, dual monitor and Windows can turn off the monitor after some time.
I also noticed that not all the boxes are black, for instance, the community box is visible now.

[Fantominus]

This exact issue still occurs at the end of 2024.
Windows 11.
Dual monitor setup:
-Main monitor KOORUI Gaming 27E3Q.
-Secondary (vertical) monitor Acer QG241Y P.
GPU: RX6700xt - Adrenaline 24.8.1.

Causes of the issue on my side (needs both to occur):
-Windows scale (Display Settings > Scale) of display set to 125% (Does not occur when set at 100%).
-Displays turning off automatically.

I hope this information will help with fixing this issue.

[Red Light]

Can confirm, I have two monitors with different resolutions and different scale settings, which causes this issue.

A workaround: setting the same resolution on the secondary display as on the main display using Dynamic/Virtual Super Resolution.