SOLVED : Workstation Pro 16 Black screen

[Jonathan3]

Hi, I experiment black screen when looking at videos in a VM and I've experimented a lot to try to solve this issue.  The VM is usable for other purpose, but guest screen goes black when viewing videos.

Here are debug informations:

"Old computer" = not very old : intel i5 laptop from january 2020, running Windows 10 20H2

"New computer" = Ryzen 5600x cpu + 32 GB RAM + GeForce GT 635 graphic card    ( This card is old, i'm waiting for a recent RTX card ) : Running on a ASUS x570 motherboard with the most recent BIOS ( as of February 20, 2021 ).

A VM which worked well on my old computer ( Workstation 15.5 ) was copied on my new computer.  The VM still works well on the old computer.

On this new computer, the VM boots but the guest screen goes totally black once in a while.  I found out that I can do almost anything but when I go surfing the internet and I look at a video, it triggers the black screen.  I surf with Chrome but I have tried others as well.  In chrome, if I open a new tab and it shows a video then screen will go black but I can hit "CTRL-F4" to close that tab and the screen goes back to normal.  If I leave the tab open, the screen remains black.  Note that the guest OS reports the wrong time when this occurs, the time advances much faster while the screen is black and when screen comes back, the guest time is many minutes in the future.

I have a feeling it is related to wither the graphic card or driver but I have the latest driver and I have tried with a different graphic card.  Also, I sometimes get the black screen without any video showing on screen.

Fun Facts :

I can see some of the video before it turns to a black screen.  For instance, I have tried cnn.com and clicking on a news story that has a video will show me a video but screen goes black after a few seconds.  The video is NOT full screen.

Sometimes there is no video at all and the screen goes black for a second and comes back to normal.  Immediately after login for instance, this happens, of after thunderbird ( email program ) finishes downloading all my emails.  In those cases, screen goes black for about a second and comes back to normal.

Debugging I've done :

I have the latest updates on the host computer and very recent on the guest.  All drivers, including graphic card drivers are the most recent on the guest.

I have tried with more then one VM.  I even created a new VM.  They all have a similar problem.  Some VM were created using an intel computer and others using an AMD computers.

The guest VM have the latest VM-Ware tools installed.

I have tried changing many settings, including the 'enable 3D acceleration' setting without success.

host has 32 GB and I reserved 16 GB for guests only so that all guest RAM ( 8 GB ) can fit in real RAM and no virtual ram is used.

The host is a newly installed computers with only 2 important programs installed on a clean Windows 10 : VM-Ware, and LibreOffice.

I have uninstalled workstation 16 and installed 15.5 : Same problem.  I've re-installed 16.1.   ( Note that 16.1 seems to be better, it doesn't get black when I get my emails in thunderbird for instance ).

I have tried with another graphic card ( GTX 1550 ti ) and the problem remains.

I am not totally sure it's the video that triggers the black screen but this seems by far the best way to trigger a black screen.  I can use the VM to edit files or do other simple tasks for long periods without problem but as soon as I go on a webpage that shows a video, I get the black screen.

Note that "black screen" is only the guest screen that goes totally black. That includes the windows task bar and everything else.  The host is totally normal.

Writing this text took a little while and even if there is no video on the VMWARE Forum page I am in, the screen went black 2 times while I was writing.  Both times it stayed black for about 3 seconds.  The second time it went black, I continued writing to see if it would get the key pressed, and it worked.  The text I typed while screen was black was recorded correctly.

The first time I used VM-Ware on this machine, I had activated Hyper-V.  I then deactivated it but it may be related to this problem, I do not remember what I did to activate it so it's not impossible that some part of it was not well deactivated, but I think it is.  I did the ( bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off ) and rebooted.  I also went in control panel / program and features / activate or deactivate Windows features and removed the checkbox from Hyper-V.

[Jonathan3 · Accepted solution]

I solved the problem myself so let me share the solution here for anyone else that has a similar problem.

I have done two things but I am fairly sure I know which one solved the problem.  I am including both things here in case I'm wrong as I have no intention of investigating more unless somebody needs to know.

First : I updated the BIOS of the motherboard.  The 5600x CPU is fairly recent and needed a motherboard firmware upgrade and the firmware seems to change often.  I had used the 'check for update' button from the ASUS software and I thought I had the latest, but I looked on their website support page and found a more recent BIOS, so I installed it.  I do not think it solved my problem.

What probably solved the issue : When I booted the VM, I had a error "cannot connect to sound stream"  ( I don't remember the exact wording ).  I didn't care too much about this since sound wasn't important for me and I had a much more important problem : Black screens !  It turns out that solving the sound issue solved the video issue as well !  In VM settings, under the option "Sound Card" I selected "use system default sound card" instead of the other choice "specify host sound card" which lets you select the card in a ListBox.  That's it.  This solved the sound in my VM, but also solved the black screen problem I had.   When I was seeing a video, there were also sound involved and sound caused the black screens.  Some other programs caused short sound too and I was seeing black screens that didn't last too long when I was supposed to hear a sound.

In case anyone from VM-Ware reads this and needs more info, you can write to me.

The sound card that was selected that caused a problem : "Acer CB281HK ( 2- NVidia High Definition ... "

The sound comes out of my HDMI monitor, I have no other speaker or headset connected to the PC.

( Motherboard = "ASUS TUF Gaming X570-PRO (Wi-Fi)" and GPU = "NVidia GeForce GT 635" )

The problem also occurred with a GeForce 1550 ti video card.