Screen randomly goes black when in lightroom classic

[roc97007]

Someone please talk me off the ledge.  I have a Dell Precision T3610, six core Intel CPU, 56 GB ram, running the latest Windows 10 with a Nvidia GTX 1050.  I make part of my living with photography and spend a lot of time in Lightroom Classic.  I'm an Adobe CC user and all my apps are on the latest version.

At random times the screen will go black.  The server has not crashed, as if I have something playing in a web browser the sound will continue.

The only solution is to hold the power button in until the power turns off.  After boot, the system will work for some random amount of time before the screen goes black again.

I've done a lot of googling on this, and it appears to be a common problem with Lightroom Classic or Photoshop and nvidia graphics cards.

The suggested solutions are often impractical or seem unlikely to affect the problem.  (a) update your drivers.  The always say to do this.  My drivers are the latest available.  (b) downgrade video drivers to something or some custom driver.  I'm unwilling to do this and I don't believe it's a real solution.  (c) Swap out your video cables or use special video cables.  I bought and installed the cables recommended, and had the same problem.  (d) Turn off graphics acceleration in Lightroom.  This works, but it's an unacceptable solution.  I work on batches of thousands of photos, and graphics acceleration is a key feature in my workflow.  Lightroom Classic is too slow without it.

Besides this being really annoying, I'm concerned that having to hard-reboot my workstation has the potential to corrupt my lightroom catalog.

So as I said, someone please talk me off the ledge.  I'm about to dump nvidia and go with ATI, maybe an RX580.  Before I do that, is there anything I can do, besides turn off acceleration, which would fix this problem?

[roc97007]

I've long suspected that the black screen is a product of the GPU crashing, perhaps running out of memory.  Interestingly enough, I do occasionally get "unable to render" messages due to "out of memory".  The performance tab on Task Manager shows only about 55% of the 32 GB main memory used, but the video card has 8 GB, and I start seeing bad behavior from Lightroom when the GPU local memory usage approaches 6.5 Gbytes, or roughly 80%.

My understanding is that the GPU is supposed to use system memory when it runs out of local memory, at a performance penalty, but system memory usage always shows zero, as reported by the performance tab.

The system seems to be handling high usage better now and I'm not sure why.  Both Lightroom and Windows are on continuous updates, and I periodically check for (and install when available) updates to the nvidia studio driver, and maybe there was something in one of those that led to a more graceful reaction to running out of memory.

There remains the question as to why the system shows the gpu as having 20% remaining local memory when problems start to occur, and why it's not using system memory as advertised.

I also note that when using Lightroom heavily over long periods of time, the GPU memory usage steadily climbs.  Restarting Lightroom will cause it to drop substantially, then it gradually climbs again.  Perhaps a memory leak?

[icronticprime]

I'd like to reinforce your experience here with my own, which is quite similar.

I have a very high-powered rig: AMD Ryzen 9 5950 16-core CPU, 64gb RAM, NVME SSDs, and an NVIDIA RTX 3090 gpu. My monitors are dual 4K monitors. I have absolutely no problems in any situation: heavy gaming, etc.

I also shoot professionally and Lightroom is critical to my workflow, and I get constant black screens in both Lightroom and photoshop, and even sometimes Premiere Pro. I think it has to do with Adobe's GPU acceleration engine, and I believe dual monitors is a causative factor. It happens intensely when I am making adjustments in Lightroom especially: moving sliders, etc. I noticed that it often happens when I scrub the timelines in Premiere Pro as well. 

Anyways, I don't think this is an "us" problem: I think it's a software bug with Adobe's implementation of GPU acceleration, NVIDIA GPUs, and dual monitors. 

I don't think there's anything we can do to fix it other than to bring this to Adobe's attention. 

[roc97007]

Yes, that's the same circumstances -- nvidia card, two monitors, screen randomly goes black, usually when I'm doing something involving acceleration like adjusting a slider or changing the photo angle. It appears to be the GPU crashing, and I strongly suspect that the acceleration code is the cause.

Turning off acceleration results in no crashes, but that's not a good solution.

[icronticprime]

And YES: Now that you mention it, rotating a photo during a crop is much more likely to make it happen. It crashes and comes back after a few seconds. It's so aggravating! 

[Pippers]

Just want to point out this happens on AMD cards as well. At least, it does on my RX5700 card. It hasn't been happening as much lately, thankfully. The last time it happened is when I made a post about it here two months ago.

[roc97007]

Good to know.  So switching to AMD probably wouldn't help.

Do you have two monitors?  That seems to be key.

I have been keeping the performance screen up on the other monitor as I work, and I think I can correlate the crashes with high GPU memory usage.  On that basis, I swapped out the card for one with more memory -- 12 GB local.  I haven't characterized it completely yet, but although it still crashes, it doesn't seem to be happening as often.  Maybe a memory leak?

[icronticprime]

I have the RTX 3090 with 24gb of GPU memory, so.... possibly but even going to 24gb doesn't stop it

[PedroCampos]

same issue here, but just 1 monitor... mainly happen when moving sliders in lightroom as well, it's driving me crazy...

[Lumigraphics]

Windows 10 Business - are you bound to AD and is it possible that a GPO or security software is causing issues? Are you working with local assets or across a network?

[roc97007]

Working from home, so Active Directory is not involved.

OS is on a local SSD, the catalog is on a local M2, and the photos are on a local 12 TB drive.

[Lumigraphics]

Have you sent logs to Nvidia support? I'd use a test LR catalog for this.

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5149/~/collecting-logs-for-display-issues-%28fli...

[Dybsrox]

I have this same issue, it's been plaguing me for about 2 months now. I've done a full hardware replacement on every piece of equipement in my computer except my CPU and GPU as they are a bit expensive to upgrade. 
I have run every diagnostic I can muster on my computer parts and they all seem to be in prime state. 
Uninstalled and reinstalled Lightroom and Adobe's entire suite. 
Still happens. 
I cant use half of the gradient tools or the AI tools in Lightroom without it crashing my monitors. Only way to fix it is to reboot my computer. 
Any solution to this problem would be greatly appreciated. 

[roc97007]

Ok, so, there is something that worries me, and that's Adobe's possible reactions to this issue.  The ideal case would be if they found the problem and fixed it.  But I see a possibility that they could just turn off acceleration in a future update, as they did shake reduction in Photoshop, rather than put the effort into getting it to work on Apple silicon.  One of Adobe's best features, heavily promoted when they introduced it, and they just dropped it.  I guess I'm concerned that we could see acceleration go the same route.