Odd Kinect v2 / Graphics Issue and Solution

I had a funky issue that I resolved recently and thought I would share what happened lest it be useful to anybody in the future.

Recently, I had a machine where a Kinect v2, directly connected to any of the onboard USB 3.0 ports, was blinking on and off (at about 5s on, 5s off) and not being recognized by the system.

Additionally, I noted that there was a non-display (I had two connected to a K6000 card that were showing up) showing up alongside my two extant displays. Touch was drawing across that context when set to Perform on ‘all monitors’, so that was an issue in itself.

From what I could tell the problem was that the system was booting onboard video before the Nvidia card and, in so doing, was making a ‘phantom’ graphics context at the OS level despite that nothing was attached to the onboard card. It may have begun doing this when a VGA display was connected to onboard graphics in the BIOS config step of setting up the machine.

For whatever reason, that graphics context being active was preventing the Kinect from successfully connecting to the system over USB 3.

I was able to confirm the correlation by disabling that ‘display’ through the Windows control panel (not Nvidia), at which point the Kinect would immediately resume working, but that false display would show up again every time I restarted the machine, thus breaking the Kinect again.

In order to correct this, I changed the BIOS setting for video priority to the PCIe slot containing the Nvidia card.

After that, the ‘phantom’ display still showed up in the control panel but was disabled by default, even after restart, and the Kinect resumed working.

Odd niche case but I thought it might help somebody.

Yerp,

N

Thanks for this @doctorhandshake

Nice debugging, thanks for the report.