I just got a pair of 4K monitors - one for a Mac Mini, and one for Windows.

The Mac is hooked up over HDMI and I use it purely for desktop applications. It works fine.

But on Windows, I’ve encountered a surprising number of issues.

Problem 1: No display during boot

I connected the monitor using DisplayPort because it seemed most appropriate to my video card, a GeForce GTX 960. It has 3 DisplayPort ports, and only one HDMI port; and I didn’t know if the HDMI port supported 4K at 60 Hz (it does), but I knew the DisplayPort ports would do it.

I swapped the monitor while the computer was on, and everything was fine… but when I rebooted, I had no display.

FIX: It wasn’t super easy to find information about this but eventually I found a post that pointed me towards an NVIDIA firmware update tool for DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4 displays that fixes the issue:

Without the update, systems that are connected to a DisplayPort 1.3 / 1.4 monitor could experience blank screens on boot until the OS loads, or could experience a hang on boot.

Problem 2: Euro Truck Simulator 2 stuck minimized

UPDATE: Fixed: My Epson scanner software includes a tray icon. If I kill the process, this problem goes away. I guess it’s stealing focus when the resolution & scale change? Even though it isn’t actually showing a window? 🙄

My video card can’t handle 4K resolutions at a reasonable framerate, so I’m running games at 1080p. Also, I often stream games to my living room TV using Steam, and it’s a 1080p TV so it fits better.

When I launch Euro Truck Simulator 2, it immediately minimizes into the background, and any attempt to restore it brings it up for a brief moment but then it goes minimized again.

It doesn’t happen if one of the following is true:

  • ETS2 is run at the desktop resolution—but at 4K it takes a severe framerate hit… or
  • Windows display scale is set to 100%—but at 27” 4K, 150% is far more usable. This is the workaround I’m using but I wish I didn’t have to!

I don’t know if this is an ETS2 problem specifically, or a Windows problem. I assume other games will be affected too, but I’ve only tried Cities: Skylines and it has no such issue. ETS2 actually changes the desktop resolution for fullscreen, while Cities: Skylines uses a borderless mode that leaves the desktop resolution unchanged; this might explain the difference.

Problem 3: 1080p not pixel perfect

A 4K monitor can theoretically upscale 1080p using pixel doubling, where each 1080p pixel is displayed with four 4k pixels (doubled in both X and Y axes). I want this because it looks clear and perfect, as though I’m using a 1080p monitor…

… but my particular monitor (LG 27UL550-W) doesn’t do this - it performs smoothing/interpolation of some sort on the upscale, and as a result it looks blurry.

I feel that my GPU drivers should be able to render at 1080p but output at 4K, but if it can I haven’t found out how.

UPDATE: Integer scaling is available in the NVIDIA control panel for Turing-architecture GPUs (GeForce 16xx, GeForce 20xx and up). I have a 960 so outta luck!!

Problem 4: DisplayPort disconnects when monitor off

When I turn off the monitor, the computer sees that as a disconnected display. This is a well-known hotplug detection feature.

This isn’t really a problem when I’m sitting in front of it, but I like to stream games from the computer to my living room TV.

When I do that, I want to turn off the locally-attached display. If I do, then games basically don’t work - they see no display connected and aren’t able to select a display resolution because there’s no display to switch on. So streaming just doesn’t work at all.

Even if I’m not streaming, I prefer to have direct control over the power of my display, instead of having to use the display sleep timer to shut it off.

WORKAROUND: Use HDMI, but long-term I’m probably just gonna have to live with this problem because I understand some features require DisplayPort, like FreeSync. Some monitors have an option to turn off while appearing connected to the computer, but mine doesn’t!

Other thoughts

These are all small-ish problems. Some of them have workarounds or whatever, but like, they’re all surprising issues that I feel shouldn’t happen at all. And I’ve only had the monitor for one day!

Hardware

  • MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
  • MSI Z270-A Pro motherboard
  • Windows 10 up-to-date
  • NVIDIA drivers up-to-date

My old monitor is a 2560x1440 panel connected over dual-link DVI. It exhibited none of the above problems, but I used it at 100% scale, at native resolution, and without DisplayPort.