Think there is bit more i guess… but nvidia-settings did gave unknown… i suppose you run the settings with prime or something…if it cant proper see the monitor the information is also bit funky of that
What’s weird is that it was working with the same cord for the longest time. I even tried another cable at one point which worked just fine. But it just isn’t right now which is infuriating, would it be possible that something with the drivers changed requiring me to use a different cable?
I don’t know. I’m just suggesting try display port vs Hdmi because i think display port is better although the specs say your monitor will do 144Hz on Hdmi it isn’t working for you. I also believe that not all cables are equal. There are certified cables that meet the specs and then there are the average run of the mill cables. If you get Hdmi 2.0 or Display Port 2.0 and they are certified cables they will meet the specs. I’m not saying this will solve your problem because we haven’t figured out what the problem is actually caused by.
Since your external monitor is labeled as a Prime Display, it could also be an issue with Prime Sync. Prime sync requires modesetting which looks like you have enabled, but double check that. Modesetting can cause black screen problems there’s lots of google results for that. You could try temporarily disabling modesetting to see that is what the problem is. The short of it is when you use ‘prime-run command’ Nvidia will render the frame and then copy it to your igpu to display on screen. This can cause screen tearing different from vsync, there are two different screen buffers that are needed for prime offloading. You can read the linked article for more info on it and how to check if it’s enabled or how to disable, etc.
Finally you might not be able to use Optimus Manager’s Nvidia only mode. I didn’t look up your hardware so don’t know for sure.
Depending on your hardware you might only be able to use hybrid mode. For switchable graphics, there are three different solutions: MUXed(Old), MUXless and MUXed(New)
Most modern Optimus laptop use MUXless scheme, while some others, HP/Thinkpad/Dell mobile workstation, Clevo P650, some Alienware, etc. use MUXed scheme. At the dark age before Optimus solution came out, there is an old MUXed scheme which require reboot to switch graphics card and can only use one at a time, while the modern MUXed allow switch between Optimus and dGPU only, and can even have display output port hooked directly to the dGPU when using Optimus (only applicable for some laptop).
According to the manual for your laptop it supports Nvidia discrete graphics and Optimus
I’m not sure whether you have optimus-manager installed and have tried using that.
So this is an interesting point. My monitor would work at 144hz when in hybrid mode but would stutter a lot, so I ended up running in nvidia mode exclusively. And at one point I wanted to use hybird to see if it would help with power but the new Plasma update made it so logging in with hybrid would crash the session, so I just went back to only using nvidia.