Temporal Dithering Sensitivity - My Solution

AGI .I glanced on a thread where you, if I recall, show that for Nvidia cards it is possible to switch dithering off. Is that a feature only of a limited number of cards?

It has no effect in some 9xx and all 10xx cards.

To be honest with you. I'm not sure if the dithering option under Linux ever did anything since I remember using older Nvidia cards just fine under Windows without needing to change anything.

AGI I checked and all the monitors which I could tolerate were connected to PCs with non-Intel graphic cards. Coincidence?

Not a coincidence.

Jerry I want to get a yotaphone 3, but a yotaphone 2 in good condition is also fine. Yotaphone is available on Ebay.

Thanks. After what happened between me and Android two weeks ago I am skeptic about being able to use the AMOLED side (which may also be employing PWM), so I do not see the point of investing 800 bucks for half phone :-(
Unfortunately Yotaphone 2 was on sale for USD 100 a couple of months ago and is now out of stock. That I would have considered buying at that price.
I hope someone will soon come up with a full e-ink phone at a reasonable price.

AGI yeah, agree. 800 bucks is a high price. I will just use the e-ink side of the phone.

Gurm i think it's like 'dither-rig' i.e. the thing you use to control your dithering

Jerry these eink phone covers are super cheap. not sure how useful they are ..

Laptops probably used dithering for many years? Why is it suddenly a problem and only on new models for some people?

ryans Laptops probably used dithering for many years? Why is it suddenly a problem and only on new models for some people?

s/probably/did

Beat's me.

ryans No.

Did you manage to compile igfxtweak?

reaganry is it easy to install? I can try, but it seems different than yotaphone.

Jerry i think they just run as a bluetooth peripheral. should be easy.

Alyosha2001 context?

The backlight has ZERO to do with the dithering (unless it's an OLED), the dithering is a product of the panel and/or video card.

JTL yes, you are right. I confused it. The context was „Laptops probably used dithering for many years? Why is it suddenly a problem and only on new models for some people?”

Alyosha2001 I figured

Lowering the resolution did not solve eye strain for me on desktops. Except when the low resolution was the result of using a generic video driver (Windows: "Standard VGA", Linux: "VESA"). Keep in mind that some (most?) modern graphics cards always output the display's native resolution by default, doing all the upscaling themselves instead of letting the desktop monitor handle it. They completely bypass the desktop monitor's scaling function this way. I am not sure how this is usually done in laptops.

Hi All,

I have been having this led strain problems for quite sometime. The following combination seems to give a usable display (for me) on Lenovo laptops running Manjaro Linux KDE. I have done other modifications such as Xorg configurations, so this might be a cumulative effect, but this last modification gave significant improvement. So, this might of help to someone, even if they have other laptops or Linux distributions:

1. If you have discrete graphics, disable it and use only integrated, by selecting UMA only graphics in the BIOS. (This probably is not mandatory. Did this only to eliminate potential problems with hybrid graphics, non-intel drivers also doing modesetting etc.)

2. Pass the video option to the grub command line. For example: video=eDP1:1920x1080-16

   Format is: dislpay:resolution-bpp

   display value can be obtained by doing xrandr

   The default bpp seems to be 32. 24 did not seem to reduce the strain. 16 does reduce the strain. Some monitors are truly 8-bpp, in which case this value could probably be 24. The test image at https://cdn.avsforum.com/d/de/525x525px-LL-defb4132_vbattach85246.gif at the site https://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-flat-panel-displays/874438-test-your-lcd-panel-s-dithering-technique-pictures-included.html seems to give some good guidance on this aspect

   For testing this, you could press 'e' at the initial grub screen, add video=eDP1:1920x1080-16 in the arguments (typically after quiet).

   For permanent, add video=eDP1:1920x1080-16 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and do "update-grub" (or equivalent in your distribution).

Some pointers related to the video option:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1743535
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/kernel_mode_setting
http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/faqs/boot-options.html

From my limited understanding, it seems that Linux KMS is setting the bpp to 32 which causes dithering.

Please post your feedback, positive or otherwise.

Thank you.

Ravi

Hi hpst, I have the following laptops:

Lenovo Z51-70 and Lenovo Ideapad 310. I will check on the panels and get back. I also got improvement on my Dell desktop with a Dell monitor (which doesn't seem to be true 8-bit). I also have couple of other monitors which claim to be true 8-bit. I will try my above solution with 24 as the bpp value and see if it gives improvement.

Please let me know any specific questions that you might have on the solution I posted. I will be more than happy to give all the details.

Ravi