True @ItzTheDay and @Morgan_PG . A year ago, or when I posted this the fist time I asked them about patchnotes. They emailed me back and told me there are no publicly available patch notes. Makes you think somehow.
I really have to go a long way there. It was quite an Odyssey, perhaps this is also the namesake of the monitor.
I bought one or at least received one from work. QA for games and software and stuff. Was amazing to work on that thing. But when ever I started a game, the monitor went black and wanted to go into sleep mode. pressing alt f4 ended the game in the background and the monitor came back.
An it already starts to get weird. When I plugged in a second monitor - any monitor - the issues stopped for almost every application. But it was still unbearable so I gave it back. Then I received another one, because I was quite annoyed by the small monitors.
The issue remained and then I started testing lots of stuff. I think there is no combination of settings of the monitor I didn't try. Then gpu settings, then cables. I did not have the best quality cables. The original ones could not be used, as there were no cables in my box, just the one for powering the monitor. But the cables in the box would be way too short for that kind of desktop I use, anyway.
I ordered pretty expensive cables. Thick ones. Overkill, probably. Then the issue stopped - mostly. When I had this issue during 10 projects I worked on, I only had it with two after exchanging cables. Also while actually gaming it was pretty alright.
While working, the space was not enough, so I received a second monitor, the same one, and mounted it above the first one. Still, almost no issues. And (maybe important to know) I was running 10 bit, 240 Hz and HDR, when necessary. I figured, that with HDR, it happened more often, than without. At a certain point, I just ran everything with 120 Hz. Most games I play and work with don't run with much more fps anyway, and the ones that do, don't need it - at least for me that works fine. Since then I never ran into a single blackscreen ever again, HDR on or off, still 10 bit.
Over the last one and a half years there were two or three firmware updates? Nothing ever behaved differently on my end. A few days ago I received an update for my primary monitor, the secondary one doesn't have it yet. Seems like a very slow rollout.
I was still interested what could have caused that and used various cables that were lying around at work. Expensive ones, cheap ones, for most of them I knew what their bandwidth was, for some I didn't. My conclusion was during that time: the expensive cables worked flawlessly. Also fiber optic cables worked fine, while I really don't know if thats just some marketing stuff. I ran mostly vesa certified and always HBR3. Every cable I tested was a 5 meter cable. The cheaper cables started with some issues, mostly blackscreens, but I also received some artifacts or flickering. Once only half of the screen worked. There were a lot of different results that made me think I just has to do something with the bandwidth. I asked colleagues and they were like: Yeah of course it's bandwidth. Did you check the resolution of these babies? And you wanna run it on more than 8 bit and HDR? I got laughed at and was told, sure these monitors are amazing, but they are not that amazing. And to this day I think thats somehow correct.
However, when I tested this, I was not on firmware 1023 anymore like the first monitor I had, and I did have proper cables back then - at least I thought it. If I only still had those cables here, I would instantly test, if these issues would reappear. Then again... Different firmware, the hardware in the PC changed, too. Impossible to comprehend now.
But sure, you guys are right - it could be a broken monitor. Or it was a somehow broken firmware back then that improved over the months. I could be completely wrong with everything I wrote - that's the Odyssey I experienced and what I experienced made me conclude that it has to do something with bandwidth. At leas on my end.
Why a Philips Evnia doen't have the issue. I really can't tell. Maybe they use another SoC. Maybe they changed something during production of those Samsung Panels. I don't think we will ever know the exact reason behind this. Maybe its a bit of everything. Broken hardware, broken Firmware. There's a reason people say buying a Samsung monitor is like playing the lottery.
@ItzTheDayThe bios screen works fine on my end, but I remember, that it didn't with the first monitor I had. I also would assume, that it's firmware related. The other issues you describe with two devices being connected to the screen is quite an interesting use case. It really sounds like the monitor doesn't know what to do when anything happens on either device. I am really interested in your results after testing!
Interesting, too @Morgan_PG . The RTX 3080 did support up to 4K 12-Bit HDR at 240 Hz with DP 1.4 a. Does the monitor use DP 1.4a or is it just 1.4? I think even there could be a slight difference, that could have made the difference there. Maybe it's just the firmware, it would be really interesting to know.
