Temporal Dithering Sensitivity - My Solution

So it depends on the age of the laptop as well as whether or not (obviously) the Temporal Dithering is causing you problems. New (last 2 years) Intel laptops with discrete graphic coprocessors (usually nVidia) still use the Intel chip for the final phases of rendering. In other words, the framebuffer and output control happen on Intel. (Or, if you are using a VGA port, DAC also happens there). The coprocessor just renders frames and deposits them into the framebuffer. This is actually great technology, but bad news for those of us who can't look at Intel chips.

I tried this (ditherig) on my Surface Book, it didn't make much difference but the screen on that is so high-def that honestly I think that is 90% of the problem there (it's a 12" screen running at 4k). I'm going to try on my pair of XPS's and see how that turns out, as well as on my Surface Pro 3. I'll post back.

Gurm Thanks for the reply. Would be very interested to know how you get on with Ditherig on your XPS's. Cheers

Gurm I bought an XPS13 (Intel Core Core i5-7200U, Intel HD Graphics 620) with the matte 1920x1080 screen, and tried to install Ditherig, but without success. I tried version 1.5 (then later 1.4), extracting the files from the downloads folder into the apps folder of the hard drive, and then proceeded to run the ditherig.exe as administrator (the one in the AMD64 folder). The Ditherig icon appears in the bar at the bottom of the screen, so that I can even open it and see all the options, but I can't select any as I get the following error message: 'Dithering Settings for Intel Graphics: Failed to configure the registers.' Am I just doing something stupid, or does this mean that Ditherig isn't compatible with Intel HD Graphics 620? Just to see, I tried to run as administrator the x86 exe from within the Ditherig archive too, and got the error message: Dithering Settings for Intel Graphics: Failed to load a DLL.

If anyone is able to help, I'd be really grateful, as I'm just going to return the XPS 13 otherwise. It's nowhere near as painful as other LCDs I've used. But it's definitely not comfortable for me.

si_edgey Sorry for the delay in responding. I couldn't get Ditherig installed on the XPS13, so had to return that machine. I don't understand why I couldn't get it to work - perhaps it's not compatible with Intel HD Graphics 620? Anyway - am very glad that it's still working for you. :-) It'd be interesting to hear if anyone else can get it to work too.

Ditherig makes my XPS13 - which was already very nice - a real joy. If only it were more powerful (it's last year's model, so a Core i5). My XPS15 gets BETTER with Ditherig, but not perfect. I am going to play with drivers. It's worth noting that the XPS15 has Anniversary edition of Windows 10 on it, which is worse on my eyes than standard Windows 10 (I've refused to upgrade on my primary machines since I have work to get done!)

I am going to try reinstalling the XPS15 with Windows 10 non-anniversary (I assume Windows 7 is not an option) which might make it much friendlier, and then roll back the Intel drivers to last year's drivers (which I use with much success on the XPS13). Adding ditherig on top of this may very well make this the ultimate machine for me... at least until I am forced to go to Anniversary Edition.

Finally got Ditherig installed on my machine, I used the newest version (1.6). Can folks share the settings they used to achieve the best result? Did you need to reboot to see changes?

It should be IMMEDIATELY obvious. It kicks in instantly. If you see it running in the tray area, it's active. Your chip might not be supported, although it ought to be with the latest version.

OK, I will continue to use it and see how it feels. The laptop video card is an Intel HD 5500 which is listed as a supported.

ensete It can also be the drivers. Also if you are running Windows 10 anniversary edition (any version higher than 1585) that can be the cause as well. I downgraded all my Windows 10 machines to 1585 and am doing much better as a result.

Yeah, so the culprit is likely the latest Intel drivers, which are harsher than the ones from, say, a year ago.

Finally I am able to install ditherig on my laptop to test it out. I used the latest v1.7 version, installed the zip file and used the exe under the folder amd64. I tried the exe under x86 folder but it does not work, it gave a missing dll error. For some reason the exe under amd64 works, even though my laptop is not using amd processor or graphics card at all.

Anyway, I right clicked the icon on the system tray, select the "Disable all dithering function". So I will test out for a few days to see if it reduces my eye strain or not.

One thing I noticed that when taking a photo of the screen using my cell phone camera, I can still see the "shimmering" and checked pattern (see photo below). I thought if we disabled dithering, it would eliminate this shimmering effect which we can only see using a cell phone camera?

I thought if we disable dithering, when we took a photo of the screen using a cell phone, it would look like this:

The photo above (CNN website) is from my current cell phone (HTC One M9+ Supreme Camera Edition), which shows nice and clean image, no shimmering and no checked pattern.

Both photos, the desktop with dithering menu and the CNN website were taken using the same cell phone (my old HTC One Max).

So shouldn't disabling dithering would eliminate the shimmering / checked pattern on the screen? I thought that is one of our prime suspect for the cause of eye strain?

Kray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern

Can have other causes too I think.

AMD64 doesn't mean you need an AMD processor. It just means the generic x64 command set.

si_edgey Good to hear. Dell XPS is a great laptop.

Over time I still find the CPU in my Macbook adequate, but it's missing things such as Thunderbolt 3 and uses a proprietary SSD connector, which means I can't upgrade the storage beyond 512GB. Not to mention the GPU is a joke.

Alas I am doing extremely well with recent medical treatment. Will write about that soon.

What operating system are you running with this setup? Windows 7 has only very limited support on this machine. I am going to be installing Windows 10 2015 LTSB so that it doesn't get "anniversary update". What are you running? Also, my 9550 is nowhere near as good on my eyes as my boss's. Same screen, in theory, although I need to verify that using the panel query tool.