My 970 is a Gigabyte G1 Gaming edition. No problems at all with it, but then the first and ONLY video card I've had (non-screen) problems with is my Gigabyte G1 Gaming 1070 card.

It's a mighty expensive exercise buying video cards and monitors and having to sell them second hand. Here in New Zealand store return policies don't really support "'cause it gives me headaches" although I was lucky in the case of my former Acer XB271 IPS monitor (flicker free, low blue etc but still gave me headaches) that I managed to return for near full purchase price.

I'm still stuck not knowing if ALL Nvidia 1070/1080 cards are unusable by me.

  • Gurm replied to this.

    AgentX20 I'm guessing it's "all", since I'm finding that 970's are in the "some" category but 6x0 and 7x0 cards are in the "none". Which sucks for you (and me).

    I'm currently investigating if the OS or Motherboard drivers have any bearing on this. They SHOULDN'T. but since the cables and monitors are the same...

    KM My thoughts are we must buy and test current cards to see if they work.

    Unfortunately, at some point someone has to buy expensive equipment and see if it works.
    The best way is to have companies / people who do this for a living (reviewing hardware) review to see if it's bad or not.

    Problem is, we've yet to determine what reliably causes the issue. PWM, Dithering are big candidates as well as others. But then what causes the dithering? Motherboard? Graphics unit? Montitor? Some of the above?

    There have been some ideas already that haven't really panned out so I'm interested in hearing any ideas that I could setup / host.

    In any case, The GeForce GTX 750Ti works well for me (dithering disabled under linux) with a 8-bit monitor 🙂

      a month later

      I recently bought an MSI GeForce GT 710 and use it with Windows 10. Seems it's usable so far. I wonder if one of those forced upgrades is going to break anything. Probably just a matter of time.

      KM, no it turns out that you just have to buy one of the NICE ones. Zotac and EVGA were both dreadul on my eyes, but MSI is just fine! (It also lights up red and has wicked-looking heatpipes...)

      I don't have any of these cards, but I can comment on a feature that might be worth considering.

      For HTPC use, the 960 is the only one of the 950, 960, 970 and 980 series that has both HDMI 2.0 and hardware h.265 encoding and decoding.

      10 days later

      This is interesting reading. I recently built a computer for home using an 8-bit Viewsonic VA2855SMH monitor and an EVGA GTX560 1GB card. This computer is causing me eyestrain whereas the same setup with a crappy old Asus GT 610 card doesn't.

      @Gurm - did you adjust to the EVGA card in the end? I would love to test an MSI GTX 560 for example, but the problem is the process of testing this 'just to see' can lead me to having a migraine for several days! This is what stops me experimenting too much as I just can't handle them any more.

      I think I'll pick up an MSI 750ti to see if that changes things..

      I went from GTX 650 -> 970 hooked up to my plasma TV. I thought at first the 970 looked a little "noisier" but since I have not had any symptoms I've chalked that up to me looking for a change when I switched cards.

      I got a reminder recently about how vital the GPU is in my eye-friendly chain when I hooked up a 3rd-gen Apple TV to my plasma TV and started to get all the classic symptoms within 30s. With my 970 viewing time on that TV, which is my most eye-friendly screen, is only limited by the natural fatiguing of my eyes over 4-5 hours. (More and more it looks like dithering is more problematic for me than PWM. My iPhone 6s which has no PWM becomes problematic within 15-30s which is much worse than many PWM screens which I use briefly out of necessity)

      Thanks for the info @degen - out of interest what brands were your 650 and 970? And yes, it sounds like temporal dithering is at least part of your problem - it is my entire problem!

      @Slacor - this forum is really great, a brilliant way of communicating. Quick idea - would it be possible to have some custom info from each user below their posts? This would include what they believe their problem to be (Blue Light / PWM / Temporal Dithering Sensitivity), their current working setup and maybe even a link to a post they've made detailing their solution so far? The reason for this is that a monitor solution for someone suffering from PWM sensitivity would be different to the solution for someone with TD sensitivity and vice versa, so it would be easier to focus on solutions that are applicable to you.

        si_edgey would it be possible to have some custom info from each user below their posts?

        If you hover over a username, it displays info about that user. You can "write something about yourself" in that by going to your Profile (Username -> Profile)

          Slacor Very useful feature. I just added my usable setting in my profile.

          9 days later

          I am starting to think that the MSI GeForce 970 has different architecture from the eVGA and Zotac. Both of those were cheaper cards in spite of being clocked higher. Did nVidia do a mid-generation change on the Maxwell chips to release higher-clock-capable chips with less cooling? It seems that some of the Maxwells feel as bad to me as the Pascals (10x0) in this regard.

          I can order an MSI, but would love to figure this out.

          My new GeForce GT 710 is not as good as I initially thought. Looking at the screen for longer periods of time didn't feel as good as with my old Quadro card. I blamed Windows updates for it, and for some days I tried Linux, which has its own still unsolved eye strain reasons. But now after installing Windows 7 SP1 my eyes still didn't relax. So I put my Quadro card back in - much better instantly.

          Even Quadro cards aren't 100% immune to this problem. I run a Quadro K420 at work, and when I updated to Windows 10 Anniversary my machine became instantly harder to look at. I downgraded immediately. There are so many ways for the drivers to utterly f*$# with our eyes. 🙁

          I also have a Quadro K4200 at work and together with DELLU2412M was a mess. Not as bad as an Intel graphics card, but not as good to can work all day with it.

          Currently I'm testing this Setup with DELL U2415 monitor. It seems to be better.

          What a nightmare. So many variable and so many interactions and who know so little. This is going to take years and years to sort out.

          dev