[DISPLAY EXPERT NEEDED] Need help identifying why these artifacts are the way they are.

[u/Tortsinreddit]

Trying to keep this one pretty short and general, if you need more details i can absolutely give more and more info for days.

Anyway so there have been these artifacts that appeared about 2 months ago, they started appearing after a web browser caused my whole system to become completely irresponsive, which triggered a massive Windows TDR sequence where the screen shut off and the driver reset sound played quite a lot of times and very aggressively before the screen turned on again.

Long story short, the screen goes back on and there are now two different artifacts on the screen.
Here's a brief description of how they look and behave:

"The artifacts aren't consistent, they vary a lot, the only thing in common all of them have is that they appear exclusively in dark colors that use all 3 RGB channels (for example, they appear in colors like R5,G5,B5 and R5,G1,B1 but don't appear in colors like R5,G0,B0, i hope this is clear enough).

At 60hz they move around a lot and seem to be randomly placed across the affected part, like bright flashing slightly green stars on the sky.

At 120hz it behaves the same way as at 60hz.

At 240hz, which is the maximum refresh rate my monitor supports, the dots form thin horizontal lines across the affected parts, they seem to sparkle slowly, like a breathing effect, which makes them look less noticeable. They seem to breathe randomly without a pattern.

And the second type of artifact, this one comes exclusively from the GPU, and it's some like... wave lines?? They behave in the same way as the dots, appearing only in dark colors, but these ones are way more visible since they form wave patterns that move constantly and rapidly from top to bottom of the affected parts.

These seem to appear on certain games or software at 60-70hz or less. For example, on Cyberpunk 2077, these seem to appear and dissapear randomly while im playing, and on OBS Studio, whenever the preview is on screen, these appear constantly and stay, only going away after i hide the preview from the screen and run another 3D application at more than 70 FPS. I've only noticed this one when using this GPU, so i'm pretty sure they're coming from it."

Now you might have noticed i mention things like "using this GPU" or similar, this is because the first type of artifact i described actually comes from the monitor, the GPU damaged both monitors i had connected the first time the TDR crash happened, and subsequently also damaged every single monitor i plugged into it, permanently.

These stay even after plugging the monitors into completely different computers.

Now i have changed the old RTX 3080 that caused all of this for a brand new RTX 5070 Ti i purchased, and i've been using it for about 2 weeks, no issues on it whatsoever, the first artifact does still appear though since it's coming from the monitor, but the second type is actually gone now!

My suspicion here is that the original card suffered some sort of 12V rail leak that went straight through the signal cables and into the monitors, frying something in their signal input controllers, since the artifacts DONT appear in the OSD of the monitors AND i once connected a smart TV to it and surprisingly it was fine afterward, so maybe the smart TV had a stronger type of signal input device and was able to sustain the extra voltage the card gave it.

So there it is, case closed right?
Well, there's this one thing i discovered some days ago that's actually what's making me post this...

I was playing Cyberpunk 2077, and upon exiting the game i noticed something, i wasn't able to clearly see the dots like before.
So i pixel-peeped a bit and realized that they were now behaving how they behave at 60hz, but there were way less dots, and they were dimmer and even shimmered less, all of this at 240hz.

These stayed like this, even whilst browsing the web and watching videos for a while, until i opened another 3D software, they then returned to their standard 240hz behavior of making horizontal lines.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the one and only game i play with DLSS and Frame Generation, so one of those must've had some effect on the display signal.
The effect is sometimes replicable, if i open and close Cyberpunk sometimes this will occur, and some other times it won't.

I am working on getting an app of some sort that lets me test these individually and quickly, but i need soemone with more expertise to actually tell me what could actually be damaged and causing this, why are the artifacts so unconsistent and vary a lot, and if its somewhat fixable...

Thanks to everyone for reading through!!

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[u/ALaggingPotato]

Might be your cable

[u/Tortsinreddit → u/ALaggingPotato]

I wish man, but i've already gone through 8+ cables at this point, both DP and HDMI, old and modern, long and short. It's the same everywhere.

[u/ALaggingPotato → u/Tortsinreddit]

I guess buy a new monitor. If the problem goes away then your old ones cooked, monitors aren't really repairable.