Edit: After roughly 2 weeks, for no reason I can find, this solution has failed for me and my symptoms returned. I am now back to patching daily to be able to use Windows 10 My employer has a master level service agreement with Microsoft which allows me to speak directly with senior level accommodation agents and the coders/engineers who develop the Windows OS. I have been on several Zoom calls with them. I won't go into all the details verbatim, but one engineer came up with a hypothesis as to why Windows 10 is unusable for me vs Windows 7 causing me zero discomfort. In short, his hypothesis was something Windows 10 does called Vertical Blank Locking. This is a feature of DWM where Windows only displays updates on the monitor at discrete intervals, tied to the refresh rate of the monitor. This is at the pixel level so you can't actually see it, but it is happening. In Windows 7 in Classic Mode, Vertical Blank Locking is bypassed and screen contents are rendered directly to the screen. In Windows 10, you cannot disable it. He suggested trying a 144Hz Refresh Rate monitor to reduce the Vertical Blank Lock delay, so I purchased one, and after an adjustment period of 3 days, it is causing significantly less symptoms than other monitors, enough so that I can work for the screen for several hours vs mere minutes before. He mentioned that this has absolutely nothing at all to do with "flicker" in the monitor itself (I asked), a "flicker free" 60Hz monitor will still have a longer Vertical Blank Lock delay than a "flickering" monitor running at 120Hz and would still cause symptoms. According to the engineer Windows 11 has had significant work done in DWM to improve Vertical Blank Lock performance (he was on the team that worked on it). I have not tried much of Win11 but it may not present the same issue.

ensete Wow, this is great! Hoping you can build up a tolerance to go even longer! Thanks for updating us. Out of curiosity, would this be picked up on a capture card? I'm unsure how a capture card would work with this Vertical Blank Lock. From our Windows 11 thread, it seems Windows 11 is either the same or better than Windows 10 (for our issue), so it seems Windows 11 seems more promising. I couldn't find anything on Google for "Vertical Blank Lock", so I guess this is purely internal to MS. The reason I am curious is I am wondering if Apple/Linux distros use a similar technique (probably called something else).

ensete By any chance, did the engineer tell you what version of Windows 10 the Vertical Blank Lock was introduced or was it always there? There are some reports here of the really old Windows 10 versions being more usable

ryans He did not, only that is was a core part of the display subsytem in Windows 10 and could not be bypassed or removed.

ensete Thank you very much for sharing this, glad you seem to have found a solution that reduces symptoms. If happen to have a MacOS device as well, would you mind testing it with the 144Hz monitor as well? I'd be curious to see if Apple does anything like Vertical Blank Locking, + if the monitor would reduce symptoms in a similar way.

ensete My employer has a master level service agreement with Microsoft which allows me to speak directly with senior level accommodation agents and the coders/engineers who develop the Windows OS I won't go into all the details verbatim, but one engineer came up with a hypothesis as to why Windows 10 is unusable for me vs Windows 7 causing me zero discomfort Now we're potentially getting somewhere. I think part of the key working with engineers/project managers at big tech companies is having a technical hypothesis with a "cause and effect" relationship along with known working good/bad setups that could be quantified and investigated by quality assurance type departments, rather than just "my eyes hurt", which is where all the usual advice about blue light, flickers and other platitudes from those in power disperse. As @ryans has said, technologies like screen readers do exist for completely blind people and those are supported by "big tech companies" often with known bug trackers and QA of its own. ryans I couldn't find anything on Google for "Vertical Blank Lock", so I guess this is purely internal to MS. The reason I am curious is I am wondering if Apple/Linux distros use a similar technique (probably called something else). My guess is that it's either an internal name for "vertical sync" or related to it. Lack of vertical sync (aka VSync) causes screen tearing which some people have equated to being an eyestrain trigger though...

JTL Furthermore, on reflection from memory. I remember the Windows Aero themes on older versions of Windows also used VSync (and Classic theme did not), and I don't recall many people have problems with that. @ensete Not raining on your parade, just sharing what I know.

ensete Sounds great. Would you share which monitor you got? I think in a way, this indeed is a sort of flicker. The refresh could interfere with other flicker types, making the overall frequency so low that it is painful (even on pixel level). Would be great if you could test it also with some apple. But if you share what you bought, Ill buy it with return period and test is on my mac.

ensete Are you still doing the patching? Or this 144Hz monitor eliminates the need for patching? Is Windows 7 still better than Windows 10 with 144Hz monitor?

This is excellent news. I was wondering what other technologies were being used other than the traditional forms of flicker. Thank you very much for sharing!!

?? "This is a feature of DWM where Windows only displays updates on the monitor at discrete intervals, tied to the refresh rate of the monitor. This is at the pixel level so you can't actually see it, but it is happening. In Windows 7 in Classic Mode, Vertical Blank Locking is bypassed and screen contents are rendered directly to the screen. In Windows 10, you cannot disable it." Well yeah.. DWN has vsync on, and the discrete intervals are the refresh rate, usually 60 Hz. The Windows 7 Classic mode differs from XP in that 7 has brutal tearing. It cannot be used for videos without tearing. You NEED vsync for videos. Though it's been a long time and I haven't tested to see if overlay in 7 Classic theme avoids the tearing in videos or if it is also susceptible. Good that they worked on vsync, because Chrome has problems with vsync lag in Windows. The advice to use a 144 Hz monitor is not bad, but a 120 Hz monitor is better IMO. Why? Because for video the integer multiple is evenly divisible. 24, 30, 60 Hz all divide neatly. With 144 only 24 does. Though, 60, 120 etc. would have the ability to beat in time with AC power, 144 would be offset from that, so it would be better in an environment still using magnetic ballast fluorescents.. You are still using vsync in Windows 7 if you're in the Aero theme.

Feedback from Microsoft OS engineers and something that is helping me

Oshim

HAL9000

As I said, I have never had a TN panel…

And these 12 bits I have never seen before 🙁

Sorry! Maybe someone with a TN panel should reply here.

Clokwork

HAL9000 afaik, TN panels accept up to 8 bit signals natively. Some are 6. If you are seeing any color profile above 8 bits and your panel isn't OLED or didn't currently cost thousands of dollars, odds are it's an 8 bit panel. Choosing anything above 8 bit will just use FRC (temporal dithering) to obtain those colors.

If you are not sensitive to FRC, I'd say by all means, use the higher bit profile.

AGI

Oshim Many thanks. I got a grasp of what you mean now. However, I am not given the option to change the color depth (or I do not know where to find that parameter) in the NVIDIA Control Panel. I believe that by default the OS determines what graphics processor is to be used, and the display is controlled by the integrated graphics.

I see that in principle it is possible to select the GPU for each application. I was unaware of that. It looks like all applications except NVIDIA Control Panel and Adobe Acrobat rely on the Intel GPU.

Do you set your computers differently, i.e., do your displays use the NVIDIA GPU?

Cheers.

Oshim

AGI

What do you mean "by default the OS determines what graphics processor is to be used, and the display is controlled by the integrated graphics" - this is completely untrue.

You have power over that. Just go to the back of your computer and plug the monitor in some of the GPU display ports or HDMIs or DVIs. Once plugged there, the OS has no say but to take video signal from the GPU 🙂

If you keep your monitor plugged to some of the motherboard's outlets, then yeah, you are going to be using the integrated graphics for sure… But you don't want that, you want the GPU to be displaying.

Hope this helps…

AGI

Oshim

Hey, thanks for your patience. I meant that the laptop standalone (without external monitor) and as shipped is configured to use the Intel graphics card for the display and for all the apps except Adobe Acrobat and NVIDIA Control Panel. As a non-expert, I was wondering why there is an extra graphics card then! I was not implying that I am not allowed to change those settings, I was just reporting what the default settings are.

Believe it or not, I have not made use of an external monitor since 2010 because of my unaddressed visual issues. But now I am struggling on the laptop too, so I should give a monitor a go.

AGI

Oshim Just go to the back of your computer and plug the monitor in some of the GPU display ports or HDMIs or DVIs. Once plugged there, the OS has no say but to take video signal from the GPU

Hey, I have just done that. The system uses Intel UHD Graphics even when it is connected to an external monitor.

NVIDIA customer support confirmed that that is how it is supposed to be. NVIDIA Quadro kicks in only when using Adobe Acrobat and when playing games (which I do not do).

Oshim

AGI

Aaaahh… Quadro… I see 😉

ensete

ryans Kind of the same. The monitor solution has completely failed and my symptoms are now exactly like they were before. I am back to patching to get through the workday.

I am trying to get an early client build of my companies Windows 11 setup to see how that works for me. My home PC is still on Windows 7 and will be forever.

ryans

ensete I am trying to get an early client build of my companies Windows 11 setup to see how that works for me

Did you have any luck with this?

hayder1983

ensete Are you still symptomfree on Windows 7? I am thinking about reinstalling everything on Windows 7, because i could live without win 10 on my home pc.

Is Vertical Blanking on Win 10 off when (example) playing a fullscreen PC game? I think i have less symptoms wenn using any game than watching a video, dont know why. Perhaps Direct X is doing something different in games?!

Is it vertical blanking always alternating upper and lower half of the screen or is it somehow more complex? If it is only upper and lower half alternating it should be sufficient to only use upper half for watching videos(e.g. small window in the upper right corner) and reading should only be a problem when scrolling on fullscreen.

ryans

ensete Vertical Blank Locking

While reading the Linux Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) docs, I came across something called Vertical Blanking. It looks to have originated from CRT monitors.

hayder1983

ryans You can disable vertical blanking if you make a custom resolution in the AMD driver. It is disabled by default for my setup, even without custom resolution.

Sunspark

You can't disable it, but you can use reduced blanking.

There is nothing special about it, it's just a different timing standard (shorter).

hayder1983

Sunspark ok sorry, thought it is the same thing

Sunspark

The reason it can't be disabled is because of how rendering is done, it's not done on an individual pixel level but draws as a line from the top down. This is why if you don't have vsync turned on you get "tearing", that's because the new frame being drawn isn't lined up the same way as the one being overwritten.

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