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.

  • JTL replied to this.

    MagnuM CCFL is just the backlight, but maybe things are different since they are older monitors.

      MagnuM I have a CCFL monitor in the studio and at home which i can use for many hours at a time with my PCs, but plug a MacBook in and I get exactly the same symptoms developing as if I was using the laptop screen, due to ththe dithering also being applied to the output of the Mac.

          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.

              martin I'm on the case with this man - got a support ticket going and trying to get escalated to a programmer for some help. I've also posted on the Nvidia deeveloper forum but with no responses yet. I'll make sure to post if anything useful comes up!

                  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.

                      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.

                      http://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/gameworkslibrary/coresdk/nvapi/structNVDISPLAYPORT__CONFIG.html

                          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.

                          • JTL replied to this.
                            25 days later

                            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.

                              7 days later

                              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.

                              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.

                              • JTL replied to this.

                                degen I wonder how well GB-LED and other LED technology would work? Do you know if it's just white/blue LED's you have a problem with?

                                    JTL I haven't tried any other LED technologies besides WLED except for the Galaxy S2, and that was a long time ago.

                                      Hello all
                                      I am new to this discussion and am a family md.
                                      I also have had eye strain with certain laptops.
                                      Dithering is a new concept for me and would be quite a discovery.
                                      I have installed the solution and will try for a few weeks

                                      dev