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Screen goes black for 2 seconds

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Joined
Dec 19, 2012
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Motherboard
Gigabyte Z390 Designare
CPU
i9-9900K
Graphics
RX 5700 XT
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
Hi,

I have a problem in MacOS Catalina 10.5.1. I am using a 5700 XT video card which is natively supported. From time to time, my screen goes black for 2 seconds and comes back. Any idea why?

I have to mention that my iGPU is disabled completely from BIOS.

Screenshot 2019-11-15 at 11.22.37.png
 
Hi,

I have a problem in MacOS Catalina 10.5.1. I am using a 5700 XT video card which is natively supported. From time to time, my screen goes black for 2 seconds and comes back. Any idea why?

I have to mention that my iGPU is disabled completely from BIOS.

View attachment 436007
dodgy cable?
 
Didn't check because I don't have Windows installed. I only use MacOS.
may be worth trying to see if it is hardware or software issue
 
I have a problem in MacOS Catalina 10.5.1. I am using a 5700 XT video card which is natively supported. From time to time, my screen goes black for 2 seconds and comes back. Any idea why?


@andrai886,

I saw this exact same issue on my White Knight build (see sig for specs) when I updated from Mojave 10.14.6 to Catalina 10.15.1 ... So i booted into a clone of Mojave and the display was fine, booting back in to Catalina 10.15.1 and the main display would go black for a second or two randomly. The time in between these black display issues could be anything from an hour to a few mins.

Sometimes I also noticed a very slight glitch in the display, hard to explain but looks like a sync issue.
Every time one of these black screens or "glitches" occurred I would see the following in the console log :-

Code:
kernel: IOConsoleUsers: gIOScreenLockState 1, hs 0, bs 0, now 0, sm 0x0


This is interesting as previously I thought that a gIOScreenLockState event was only connected with IGPU issues and generally results in not being able to boot MacOS, however that is a gIOScreenLockState 3 event. I tried searching the internet for any details connected with a gIOScreenLockState 1 event but can find nothing.

These console events only happen in Catalina, Mojave is fine .... no display glitches, no console events - same clover version, same config.plist, same 3rd party kexts.

I tried fiddling with a ton of BIOS and MacOS changes but nothing helped ...

So I decided to just accept the situation, assuming that the issue is most likely down to a bug in Catalina (after all it is full of them) and wait for the next Catalina update in the hope that Apple sorts the issue out.

However .... after a day or two i wondered if the random black screen/glitches was due to the monitor reacting to a video timing/sync issue as it only effects my main screen which is connected by DP, it it does not happen on my second screen which is connected by HDMI.

So i went through my main display's on screen menu settings (its a LG ultrawide 21:9 monitor, 3440x1440 resolution) in the settings there as an option to enable or disable Display Port 1.2. As my Vega 64 dGPU is DP 1.4 i had set the setting to enabled since the day i installed the Vega over a year ago.

As an experiment i disabled the option ... since then i have not seen the random black screen issue with Catalina.

DP-setting.jpg
Disabling the Display Port 1.2 option in the monitors settings has had no effect on my display quality, it is still running at 3440 x 1440 @ 60 Hz but the random black screens have stopped.

I have not been able to nail down the exact cause (other than the console event above) but my current theory is that MacOS is resetting the AMD frame buffer and/or AMD drivers which causes a momentary blip in the video sync/timing that the monitor reacts to with a black screen for 1 or 2 seconds.

As to why disabling the DP 1.2 option resolves the black screen issue ? ... well i think it could be down to something in the handshake protocol between the monitor and video card which is triggering the event seen in the console log, by disabling the DP 1.2 option in the monitor settings I think that the handshake drops to a simpler protocol ...

I've only seen this issue with Catalina, all previous versions of macOS have worked fine on the same hardware with the same settings. I'm not sure if this is the same issue that your seeing as I have AMD Vega 64 and you have AMD 5700.

You can check your console log every time you get a black screen and see if your getting the same gIOScreenLockState events I am by executing this command in terminal :-

Code:
log show --last boot --predicate 'process == "kernel" and eventMessage contains "gIOScreenLockState"'


Keep terminal open, each time you see a black screen goto the terminal and press the "Up" arrow to use the last command and press return.

MacOS support for AMD 5700 series GPU's is still very early and should be considered beta so your issue my be related to that, either way let's hope that Apple fix it in the next Catalina update.

I'll update this post after the next Catalina update and report if the issue still exists or as been resolved.

Cheers
Jay
 
Last edited:
I will try this and report back. Thanks!
 
Any update on this? My main screen does the same thing. my other screen is unaffected, only the one connected by DP. Catalina 10.15.3 update didn’t fix the issue.
 
While I'm not on Catalina (rather Mojave), I have the same issue, with the machine "losing frames". I was on Sierra up until recently, and had been for a couple years, with no issues. I tried adjusting from DP 1.2 to 1.1, and I actually got more frame drops, and so switched back to 1.2. I'm using an iGPU as well, not dGPU.

Any other thoughts on what may be causing this?
 
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