I recently purchased an Nvidia RTX 3090, and once I got it set up, I find it gives me eyestrain!

Other than the graphics card, I have the exact same setup. Before, I was using an old MSI GT 710. My monitor is a Dell P2311H and I'm running Windows 10.

I've had issues in the past with eyestrain, and can usually tell within a few minutes of looking at a monitor that it will make me nauseated/headachy. I didn't expect that changing the graphics card could cause my issue to flare up, but sadly it has. It's not as bad as some systems I've used in the past, but it's pretty much a guaranteed headache and eye pain with some nausea after a few minutes.

Has anyone else run into this? If so, any recommendations? Worst comes to worst, I can always use my GT 710 for the monitor, and relegate my 3090 for computational workloads, but it'd be nice to have fancy graphics.

Thanks in advance.

    screengazer

    So what's occurring here is temporal dithering. Even if you are looking at static image, your gpu is constantly varying its output. Its doing this to improve colour quality on shit monitors. Discrete GPUs have done this since forever, your GT 710 will be doing it too. Every card does it differently as far I have seen, unfortunately, the nature of your latest's card's dithering is causing you a problem.

    You can possibly fix this. Changing the colour settings will change the dithering algorithm, and might make your card usable.

    A second option, if you want to use your fancy card for gaming. Is to plug your monitor into your gt 710 but tell windows to use your gtx 3090 to do all the actual processing for any given application. There is a performance hit as you might expect, but it works.

    https://www.howtogeek.com/351522/how-to-choose-which-gpu-a-game-uses-on-windows-10/

      Thanks for the detailed response, really appreciate it, I'll try this stuff out.

      I've had issues with the NVIDIA Control Panel: as soon as I click out of it, it seems like Windows just reverts to its own settings. I've tried some of the solutions in this forum for this issue, but nothing has stuck yet. I'll check out the dynamic range settings, haven't experimented with those yet.

      Interesting information about plugging the monitor into 1 GPU and processing through the other, that sounds like a strong candidate for me. Mostly the 3090 is for my job, but if I can use it for games too, that'd be great.

      screengazer Did you just change the GPU or you did also some updates like W10 version and/or Nvidia driver?

        Lauda89 That's a good point, when I installed the new card, it likely downloaded whatever the newest NVIDIA driver for it is.

        @Seagull Thanks for all the suggestions. I tried using both GPUs with the method you linked, but unfortunately it turns out that only works with 1 integrated and 1 discrete GPU. With 2 discrete GPUs, my only option was the one plugged into the monitor, and if I customized the settings in the NVIDIA control panel, those were ignored.

        I got a new monitor, an MSI G24C4, which has relatively low brightness (VA panel). I'll see how it works with the 3090.

        • MPaz replied to this.
          6 days later

          screengazer I recently purchased an Nvidia RTX 3090, and once I got it set up, I find it gives me eyestrain!

          try the combination "nvcolorcontrol.exe RGB 2" +win10(2004)
          https://www.avsforum.com/threads/2020-lg-cx%E2%80%93gx-dedicated-gaming-thread-consoles-and-pc.3138274/page-21#post-59699820

          at least when I using such a combination, the picture on the test smooth gradient changes on gf1030 (dithering may be disabled/changed)

            glvn Thanks, would you make a shortcut to the file? and then make it -> NvColorControl.exe RGB 2

            • glvn replied to this.

              Quad43 would you make a shortcut to the file

              i use simple .cmd
              echo y|NvColorControl.exe RGB 2

              19 days later

              Thanks, do you re-do this each restart or only once ever?

              This definitely helped!

              • glvn replied to this.

                Also interesting NvColorControl comes up on Malwarebytes with PUP.Optional.SearchProtect

                2 months later

                screengazer Hi, how are you feeling now with your new monitor? I'm also having issues with RTX 3090 on 3 different monitors, but it seems to make it even worse if I change color output format from RGB Full to YCbCr422. So I guess GPU doesn't cause me problems (with RGB Full), but all of these monitors cause it for some other reason. However, it might also be that the GPU is causing the problems - just different color formats use different kind of dithering and thus the symtoms are different (eye strain only VS. eye strain + hard to focus). But... I'm not sure how to test whether it's the monitor or GPU.

                11 days later

                Does anyone know why NvColorControl helps so much? This combined with IntelPWMControl (can't figure out which one is helping). Strange if it's the latter given I have Intel properly disabled, removed from Device Manager etc and there's no PWM (based off slow-mo mode on iPhone)

                  Quad43 Does it eliminate your symptoms completely? I'll also try this and would let you know.

                    MPaz I'd say makes 90% better. The best was using Ditherig 1.11 which I can never get running now 🙁

                      Think I made an error by doing the very latest Windows update, 1.12 won't work now either, only 1.14 and it doesn't help as much

                      How did you determine that it doesn't work anymore?

                        Sunspark It won't load - it gives me an error when trying to open it. Only 1.14 successfully runs 🙁

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