Ultimate mode broken on Zephyrus Duo 16 (2023)

[moldimolt]

Describe the bug
On my ASUS Zephyrus Duo 16 (2023), enabling "Ultimate Mode" causes the primary display to no longer work; G-Helper reports Laptop Screen: Off. The secondary display remains on. I had thought this was related to #825, but the issue persists in v0.100.

Clear scenario to Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Open G-Helper
2. Enable Ultimate mode
3. Reboot
4. Observe the primary display no longer works unless the Nvidia graphics driver is uninstalled, forcing it back onto the Radeon integrated GPU.

Expected behavior
Ultimate mode will route the primary display output to the dGPU.

App Logs
log.zip

Screenshots or screencasts
N/A

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: Windows 11 22H2 (22621.1992)

• Laptop model: ASUS Zephyrus Duo 16 (2023) GX650PY-XS97

Asus software

• Armoury Crate (or its services installed): No.
• MyASUS installed: No.
• Other Asus services running in background: G-Helper reports 0 ASUS services running, and I wiped my drive and reinstalled Windows prior to setting up this device to avoid ASUS bloatware. However, ASUS ScreenXpert is installed for managing the secondary display overlay.

Thank you.

[seerge]

@moldimolt hello, do I understand correctly that screen is black as well (not just not detected in app?)

Cause in a log i see that windows simply don't report it as a screen at all for Ultimate mode

2023-07-23 03:41:12: :DISPLAYCONFIG_OUTPUT_TECHNOLOGY_DISPLAYPORT_EXTERNAL: \\.\DISPLAY5 (your second screen)

And in Standard it's there

2023-07-23 03:43:46: NE160QDM-NM4:DISPLAYCONFIG_OUTPUT_TECHNOLOGY_INTERNAL: \\.\DISPLAY1
2023-07-23 03:43:46: :DISPLAYCONFIG_OUTPUT_TECHNOLOGY_DISPLAYPORT_EXTERNAL: \\.\DISPLAY2

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There are other users with DUO and it seem to be ok for them, so looks like it's something isolated to your device and probably caused by NVdia drivers.

Command to turn Ultimate mode ON or OFF is very simple and same for all devices (run in powershell as admin).

0 - to enable Ultimate (reboot after) , 1 - to disable Ultimate (reboot after)

(Get-WmiObject -Namespace Root/WMI -Class AsusAtkWmi_WMNB).DEVS(0x00090016, 0)

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1. Does powershell command work same as app ?
2. Can you install Armury and see if it works there ?

[moldimolt]

After several hours of troubleshooting, I've managed to identify how to reproduce this issue:

1. As you expected, this is Nvidia driver related, installing the latest Nvidia drivers (at time of writing, 536.67-notebook-win10-win11-64bit-international-dch-whql.exe) will create this issue, but installing the OEM drivers from ASUS (Graphic_DCH_ROG_NVIDIA_Z_V31.0.15.2901_34212.exe) does not fix the issue, even if you completely remove the drivers from Device Manager before installing.
2. Instead, this seemingly-unrelated binary for ScreenPad/ScreenXpert from ASUS fixes the issue.

I suspected the ScreenPad2Optimizer binary may just be kicking the device out of Ultimate mode and thus appearing to "fix" the issue, but I tested to ensure that wasn't the case by removing the iGPU drivers (which only disabled the secondary display that's always routed to the iGPU), and switching between Standard/Ultimate mode several times and the fix was persistent. Additionally, I wanted to make sure this wasn't a case of needing both the OEM drivers and whatever that ScreenPad2Optimizer binary does, so I tested installing the drivers from Nvidia (causing the issue again) and running the ScreenPad2Optimizer, and it successfully fixed the issue.

This issue can likely be closed as it is clearly not G-Helper related, but if you have any insight as to what's happening here I would be thankful, as I don't understand why this works to fix the problem.

[seerge]

Oke, I will move this to "discussions" instead then (so it remains in a knowledge base) :)

Formally closing as completed.