machala

Both your 660 and 1060 use temporal dithering. All the external GPUs I have tested used temporal dithering, but I have actually tested several 660s and a 1060 so I am as certain I can be that yours are dithering [it gets more complex than that, but I don't want to overburden you].

You might want to try using intel integrated if either of your desktops has that. By default, intel integrated uses spatial dithering only (ie it doesn't move or flicker), and this can be reliably turned off using software available here. Also, avoid using VGA cables whilst experimenting as RF noise will affect the signal and what you see on the monitor.

I would strongly recommend you get your own capture card so you can test these things for yourself. I found that simply relying upon my own experience of pain and discomfort was not sufficient to diagnose things. I once thought that only my 660 did not dither and that all other cards did, as the 660 was generally comfortable and other cards (intel integrated for example) caused immediate pain. I discovered after testing with my capture card that the 660 did dither, and the intel integrated did not. Best explanation I could come up with was that the monitor I using needed dithering to be comfortable, monitors use dithering too, so perhaps the superposition of two dithering algorithms made it work. Now I have since found monitors which are comfortable with intel integrated graphics (and its lack of dithering), and I no longer get random pieces of software giving me eyestrain. With the 660 I found: steam; sharepoint on chrome; office 365; and visual studio 2020, caused pain - all of which I can use fine now.

If you get the black magic card I can talk you through using it, and send you my analysis software. Be wary of buying any capture card marketed to gamers though, these will use compression and screw up the analysis.

As for why Chrome, I really couldn't say. All I can do is re-iterate the testing I have done.
gtx 660 + other external GPUs -> temporal dithering on everything in windows -> temporal dithering on chrome,
Intel integrated -> no temporal dithering on windows-> no temporal dithering on chrome.

  • JTL replied to this.

    machala

    1) I'm experiencing exactly the same on a otherwise safe system. Firefox is ok.
    2) Unforunately not
    3) WIll do.

    JTL

    That is interesting, both the gaming and professional AMD cards I tested dithered on windows. I wonder if Linux users are trusted to set their own dithering settings.

    • JTL replied to this.

      Seagull I haven't done any Windows development in quite a while, but it might be theoretically possible for a third-party utility to emulate the register changes performed by the Linux driver. There might be some caveats to this, but I'll document that later.

      5 days later

      So some news from my end:

      • Google support is unwilling to do anything with my request and keeps sending me to Chrome support that just does not exist
      • Chromium bug report: no update there. Again, please star the bug or comment there if you see the issue as well:
        https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1157382
      • @Gurm Thanks a lot for your comment, I am able to confirm your findings, Chrome v68 probably still isn't as good as Firefox (but it's really hard to tell), but definitely the issue started with v69.

      So the next course of action is clear: try to figure out what was changed in v69 and see if it's a feature or a setting that can be disabled (either directly within Chrome or by a setting for compiling Chromium - the same thing I did with dithering).

      @Seagull I am not ignoring your advice, but I do not believe the theory with the GPU being the cause is true here, at least this is the last thing I'd check - for me the issue exists on all systems I have. Additonally I am able to completely disable temporal dithering in NVidia linux drivers. On the contrary I am aware that there are differences between GPUs and even drivers in terms of their lightness on one's eyes so I am not entirely dropping this.

      4 months later
      8 months later

      I'm curious if this was ever resolved? I am noticing the same thing on current versions of Chrome (and Chrome based browsers). Also in Firefox versions >88 (with the new UI) I started having the same issue as with Safari >14. Safari 13 is fine and Firefox 78ESR is fine. Is there something that changed in the web rendering world in the past couple years that could have brought this out?

        I have used Firefox for a lot of time mostly because of the way it renders fonts. The fonts in Chrome look too thin for me and that has to do something with ClearType not being used I think. If you open a page in Chrome and Firefox and compare you will most likely see a difference in font rendering. Lately I've switched to Edge because they've enhanced font rendering and seems to use the ClearType from Windows (I've enabled in flags for "Enhance text contrast"). I like features like image of the day, vertical tabs with no caption bar, font rendering… but slowly it seems to get bloated.

        5 months later

        asus389 Hello, yes, I know about the FF and have EXACTLY the same issue. I even opened a bug report with Mozilla, but tracking down what version it started with was rather hard for me. Perhaps we could get in touch and work on this together? The mozilla devs seemed open to tracking the issue down and this may actually be our gateway to understanding what this really is all about!!

        This is all very weird and something is certainly going on here, more and more applications are using the same troubling rendering… MS Teams, RealVNC client, GeforceNow client… it's terrible…

        Sunspark Yes, it helps, I actually use dark themes everywhere I can now, but it's not the real solution…

        dev