Temporal Dithering Sensitivity - My Solution
Hey guys, little update for you. Things were going swimmingly with the XPS 15 9550 and so I thought that I'd upgrade to the most powerful machine I could get to last the longest amount of time before I need to upgrade again. Mistake. I sold my 9550 and bought the 9560 - had it for less than a week now and my searing migraines, eye strain and headaches are back with a vengeance.
I'm working on trying to find a solution - so far I'm not convinced it's the Intel drivers that are causing the problem here, I think the dithering may in fact be coming from the GTX 1050 (old laptop was GTX 960) and I feel that when I disable the 1050 in Device Manager the laptop becomes more usable. Only time will tell with this however as once my headaches and migraines have been triggered it takes a while for my head to go back to normal sadly.
I should really have just stuck with the 9550 but it was too tempting to upgrade to the latest and greatest to get the longest possible life out of a working machine. Couple of questions:
have we ever actually discovered how to disable temporal dithering for Nvidia cards in Windows? I know it's disabled by default on most but I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be enabled on the 10xx series.
can anyone else verify this same situation has happened to them? I know everyone has slightly different issues but mine is very much a sensitivity to temporal dithering (and a little just to bright light itself).
Any help or thoughts would be great, can't believe I'm back to square one again!
Thanks,
Simon
si_edgey have we ever actually discovered how to disable temporal dithering for Nvidia cards in Windows? I know it's disabled by default on most but I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be enabled on the 10xx series.
No, we don't know how.
si_edgey can anyone else verify this same situation has happened to them? I know everyone has slightly different issues but mine is very much a sensitivity to temporal dithering (and a little just to bright light itself).
Some people on Linux have disabled dithering as nVidia makes it an option on Linux.
I wish you sold it after verifiying the new machine worked for you. That's what I would have done.
Haha not the most helpful comment but point taken, if I had the £1500 spare I would have bought without selling the other one. I had tried a friends 9560 for a while and it didn't seem to bother me, but admittedly it was very casual use for an afternoon so not a thorough test. I can still return this laptop for a refund and re-purchase a 9550 so not all is lost.
I'm definitely finding that disabling the GTX 1050 makes the laptop feel like my 9550 so I'm thinking that's the culprit in my case. If only there was a way to a) test for dithering algorithms in use and b) disable them in the registry for the GFX card itself.
Curious, has anyone ever had an issue with dithering on a CCFL?
- Edited
si_edgey Isnt it possible to get in touch with someone from Nvidia, show them a link to this forum and ask them to simply allow for dithering to be disabled so we can test it? I mean seriously this is obviously a big problem for a LOT of people, I dont understand how noone from these companies is at least trying to help a bit.
si_edgey It would be really great if we could get some traction on this with the video card manufacturers. This is ABSOLUTELY fixable by them in software. Well, there are still some folks sensitive to PWM and blue light, but MOST of the issues we are having is with the devices driving the displays, not the displays themselves. The same display that is super easy to look at with a PS3 looks painful with a PS4. The difference? A newer ATI chip. The same computer and monitor that were fine with a GeForce 6x0 hurt with a GeForce 9x0. Drivers are the same, OS is the same, hardware is the same... except for the generation of GeForce chip. SOMETHING on the chip changed, whether it's FRC/Dithering, or some other kind of output anomaly. Intel was making an effort, but they changed things far enough back that they had a MASSIVE changelog to wade through and just kind of gave up. It would be good to get an "in" with someone - nVidia, ATI, Intel - and get this addressed.
I have zero knowledge of programming but came across some interesting reading.
Overview > https://developer.nvidia.com/nvapi
Programming Guide > http://developer.download.nvidia.com/tools/docs/PG-5116-001_v02_public.pdf
Could this be used to develop a 'ditherig' style app for Nvidia GPUs?
- Edited
diop Oh. so nVidia stopped being losers and finaily published some of their API's? 
To answer your question, "low level" functionality of the driver such as PWM or dithering isn't usually exposed through any of these API's. I have more ideas though.
Edit: Some of these settings look relevant.
That looks very interesting, good find there and I'm sure someone with the right skills will be able to make use of this. I have now been escalated to an Nvidia programmer and I'm awaiting them getting in touch so I will report back with whatever I find. If you have any suggestions of what to ask for then let me know now.
In other news, I think I have been too hasty in writing off the Dell 9560 - perhaps when I received the laptop I had several days of migraines that I was going to get anyway. Since then things have settled down - I reverted back to the oldest possible drivers for the GTX 1050 (381.65) on Windows 10 version 1607 using ditherig.exe to sort out the Intel 630 dithering, and I'm using the laptop comfortably for my second day now (used for 12 hours yesterday). I'm unsure of whether the roll back of the drivers has helped but I'm not going to mess with it for just now. So, good news!
I will still push for Nvidia to confirm whether they have enabled dithering and for options for disabling it within Windows.
- Edited
Just to follow up on this. I'm now using the XPS 15 9560 absolutely fine. I'm still running the old Nvidia drivers (if it ain't broke..) and I have to have Ditherig.exe running otherwise I get the old problems - I had a situation recently where I had 2 days of severe migraines and couldn't work out why - it turns out ditherig had stopped running in the background. In some ways it was a good way to 'blind test' that this is effective for me. A few drivers I'm using:
Windows 10 Home 14393 (build 1607)
Intel 630 driver 22.20.16.4729 (05/07/17)
GTX 1050 driver 22.21.13.8165 (31/03/17)
ditherig.exe v1.7
I still have to be careful - about 5 hours is my maximum tolerance, but the same goes for any screens these days. Ever since using a Macbook for 1 year without realising that it was giving me the migraines my eyes and head have never been the same sadly.
I know we're all different with different sensitivities but I really hope this solution helps someone else.
Do you have any other symptoms than migraine? E.g. bloodshot irritated eyes? I don't have migraines or anything else, I just get bloodshot strained eyes if there is PWM. I'm not sure about any driver versions or dithering. I have thus far encountered only one example which was conflicting. Huawei Mate 9 was measured by a couple of sites not to have PWM and I was not able to detect any flicker with my DSLR, but still that made my eyes water and I ended up with bloodshot eyes. Even though I used it at the lowest brightness and the night mode on. So that made me think there might be something else than PWM. But then my current Xperia XZ Premium is again OK, if I don't let it go to under 31%, where there is PWM.
- Edited
I haven't found any LED display that won't give me bloodshot eyes, and strain which comes from tension in the muscles surrounding the eye as well as temporalis muscle. I solved all of the other issues though and don't get headaches or pseudo-migraines anymore. LED light is just caustic to my eyes, and I'm willing to bet it's the same with some others here as well.