Nvidia Dithering
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JTL I completely new to Linux. Let me try.
Hi JTL, I was just trying to explore different approaches to make screenshots in linux mint. All of sudden, firefox give me this error message whenever I open a new tab or start a new browser window: "Bad news first: This tab has crashed". Not sure if i will be able to fix that.
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Not that it may help for Live distros - I'm just adding the current "xorg.conf" way of disabling dithering for NVIDIA cards:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Nvidia Graphics"
Option "FlatPanelProperties" "Dithering=Disabled"
EndSection
Source: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/375.26/README/xconfigoptions.html
I have no xorg.conf and add my options in a custom file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf. Not sure if all distributions can read those files. It works for Arch Linux.
But for testing the NVIDIA tool is probably better, for it can switch dithering on and off on the fly.
By the way, slightly off-topic but I'm currently testing another Option, "ForceFullCompositionPipeline" "true". Due to the shallow documentation I'm not sure how exactly it works and if it acts as a full compositor, but similarly it seems to prevent tearing everywhere. Which is also some kind of flicker.
And on Reddit someone said he had eye strain which got fixed just by using "compton" (a compositor):
https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/4x3seb/eye_strain_with_i3_seems_solved_with_a_compositor/
Edit: I just combined the option ForceFullCompositionPipeline with compton, which works. Compton additionally reduces some clutter when moving windows over WebKit browsers. What's going on in this chain remains a mystery: Program's drawings and accelerations -> X Server -> Driver -> Driver Options -> GL/X Render -> some screen buffers -> even more buffers (compton, "CompositionPipeline") -> graphic card's final output, including unknown forced video mode optimizations -> Monitor -> Monitor's dithering/whatever ...
KM I assume the commands ("FlatPanelProperties" "Dithering=Disabled", etc) should be typed in a terminal. For some reason, I can not open a terminal at all. I tried right click to open in terminal or "ctrl+alt+t", nothing happens. I also clicked on the small terminal icon on the task bar, nothing. Then I try to install the gnome-terminal package according to some suggestions from internet search, but the computer tells me it is already installed 
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Jerry Are you sure your Mint runs with NVIDIA drivers? Because normally distros don't have official NVIDIA drivers enabled. Instead, they use an open source driver called "nouveau". It is totally different and has other options to control dithering. I once was told by a nouveau dev that nouveau does not enable dithering by default - only on laptop LCDs.
One can disable it with xrandr. I'll try to find the needed options and then edit my post.
KM You are right, in the driver manager, there is a "xserver-xorg-video-nouveau (open-source)" item. It seems selected by default for the nvidia card, but there are also two other items "nvidia-367 (recommended)" and "nvidia-340". When I played with "nvidia-settings" software yesterday, I switched the driver to "nvidia-367", but nothings changed in the nvidia-settings window after the switch. It will be great if there is a way to disable dithering in nouveau. Thank you so much!
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Could you please provide detailed information on the linux distribution you are using?
I am currently using Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon (64-bit)
That was my fault, it does not do resizing any more.
Getting nvidia drivers to load is a bit of a PITA in linux. In fact, if nouveau is enabled in the kernel, nvidia drivers won't load! You have to disable the nouveau driver by the boot manager (grub) with nvidia drivers installed.
It's strange your terminal isn't opening.. There is a tool called inxi that can show what drivers are enabled.
For example,
$ inxi -G
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GM107 [GeForce GTX 750 Ti]
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.3 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau)
Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 750 Ti/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 375.26For disabling the driver, you need to place the below in your /etc/default/grub file and run update-grub (and update-initramfs -k all -c after for good measure
)
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nouveau.blacklist=1"Unfortunately, this all doesn't work very well on a live boot since to load graphics drivers, you need to reboot and rebooting erases changes on a live boot!
KM I'm just adding the current "xorg.conf" way of disabling dithering for NVIDIA cards:
That is interesting.
Not so much about dithering, but Linux eye strain in general: I found this 3 years old post in the MacBook thread: https://discussions.apple.com/message/24447115#message24447115
User mvanier believes DRI (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructure) could possibly be a source of eye strain in Linux. I think he may be right. Since I get eye strain not only inside Xorg but with some (all?) KMS drivers also in tty consoles, the Kernel module drm (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager) which also interacts with DRI might play a part, too. I don't know how to disable any of them. Some drivers, like nvidia, have options to disable GPU acceleration, but even then DRI is still being used. If anyone knows how to work around this, please share.
By the way, did anyone notice any relief after turning off NVIDIA or nouveau dithering? I didn't feel a change...
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ooh, look what i just found here http://www.root6.com/broadcast-engineering/temporal-dithering-good-for-colour-depth-bad-for-extending/
"WIndows: search the registry for the 2D driver settings;
Inside the registry location, create a DWORD value called DP_DisableDither and set it to 1"
- there's a section for linux too, but sounds like you have that already. havent been able to get this to work... may just be for radeon cards
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reaganry I believe that's a registry setting for the ATI and AMD drivers only.
A while ago I looked up how to do this in Linux (for AMD cards) and made a post about it:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=5173325#post5173325
With the Nvidia 750Ti, I noticed effects when updating the driver to nvidia-384 (linux)
This is despite marking dithering to disabled in the nvidia-settings..
Reverting back to Nvidia 370 resolved the issue.
I'm wondering when it starts being a issue (trying 375.82) and whether this is why newer Nvidia cards (like 1080) are a issue as they require a higher version.
I think this has already been noticed but I couldn't find the thread.
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JTL Slacor If it works for you, too, you might want to try the alternative open source driver, nouveau. It doesn't have a lot of energy saving features but at least the dithering options should still work (and chances are by default it won't enable dithering).
Did both of you get eye strain or what exactly are the latest issues?
Slacor Motivated by your post, I reverted to 2014 drivers for my nvidia GeForce cards (730, 750TI) in windows 7 and I have to say it made a noticeable difference. Now I am looking for the oldest nvidia card that can work in 64 bit windows 7 and will try it. Currently looking at nvidia Quadro FX 4400 with 512 MB memory. Not sure if there are any other better options.