Jack Just a long term update, I can use the Quadro RTX 4000 8GB without eyestrain, it seems like some Turing based cards can be good or bad, but the RTX A4000 16GB (RTX 3070 equivalent) is still absolutely unusable in Windows 10 2004, Windows 7, and Linux. Im pretty much convinced at this point that the GPU's themselves are the problem, even after upgrading to a Evga Z490 Dark, and I9-10900K the RTX A4000 is still unusable. I have tested this with multiple monitors over the duration.

Nice hearing from you again

My research is inconclusive and not yet "done" (in part due to a lack of needed hardware) but I have reason to believe that a) Potential per unit variance in otherwise identical GPUs may exist and b) certain firmware differences in both motherboard and GPU VBIOS may cause subtle interactions that may cause issues that aren't easy to isolate.

And that's before any alleged application/OS rendering issues.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

  • Jack replied to this.

      Jack Just fyi if you happen to be located in Europe/Germany Amazon.de currently sells the W5700 for a cheap 300€.

          karut Amazon.de can ship internationally in some cases

              JTL but returning the card wouldn't be as easy of course

              • JTL replied to this.

                  karut Probably not. Amazon generally does have a good return policy but I can imagine it might be complicated with international shipping.

                    JTL I agree, i think there are different VBIOS revisions on certain cards and that using certain older motherboards with newer GPU's can cause the different interactions. Ill keep my bad RTX A4000 around and try finding some VBIOS posted on the internet to try flashing it with as an experiment, they all use Samsung VRAM and are reference models so it should be pretty easy to do.

                    karut Thanks, im located in USA right now though so i can pick them up pretty cheap on ebay.

                        4 days later

                        I know this isnt a real solution, but it does work nicely. If you have a motherboard with two pci-e slots, you can just use an old Kepler based GPU to connect your monitor and use the more power GPU that causes eyestrain to handle high performance applications or games. I have 3 extra Quadro K4200's which are all safe for my eyes so i just tossed the problematic RTX A4000 in my secondary system and did the EnableMsHybrid registry trick to be able to select it as the high performance GPU and it runs applications wonderfully and is also amazing for games. An added bonus is you get the clear crisp image of the safe kepler GPU's and can run certain games at 4K without that blurry dithering look. The image quality is superb this way. Im using Windows 10 2004 19041.789, with safe GPU's i have no problem with this version of Windows 10. A lot of people from this thread use old Tesla GPU's with this trick with either a weak primary GPU or integrated GPU.

                        https://forum.level1techs.com/t/gaming-on-my-tesla-more-likely-than-you-think/

                        https://forum.level1techs.com/t/gaming-on-my-tesla-more-likely-than-you-think/171185/70

                          Jack thanks for the two-gpu-idea as backup solution if everything else fails.

                            7 days later

                            I was reading about EDID information and i came across a post that a graphic card will dither if connected to a monitor that reports a lower bit capability than what the graphic card can output at max. These new cards can apparently output 12bit color, so even with a real 10bit monitor the dithering is still active. I exported my monitors EDID and have been trying to find if the bit depth is defined in the EDID and i dont think its there, if its not defined that might explain why the graphics card is dithering as its not defined in the EDID. My theory is that even if its defined as 10bit in the monitor EDID is that hopefully just changing it to 12bits would trick the GPU to turn off its dithering. Older Nvidia cards dont support 12bit color, so this leads me to believe that possibly modding the monitors EDID can trick new GPU's to disable the dithering

                            So i was able to spoof the EDID of my monitor to make it appear as a 12bit monitor, this didnt help at all. I use the "color control" program to make sure Nvidia dithering is disabled at the registry level and there is still massive strain with the RTX A4000. https://github.com/Maassoft/ColorControl Maybe when i get nvdithctrl running it might work but at this point im 100% convinced this is a VBIOS problem.

                            I was just reading about how different generations of GPU's do rendering, and it is stated that there is a "Tiled Rendering mode" and a "Immediate Rending mode".

                            Early in the development of desktop GPUs, several companies developed tiled architectures. Over time, these were largely supplanted by immediate-mode GPUs with fast custom external memory systems.

                            Major examples of this are:

                            PowerVR rendering architecture (1996): The rasterizer consisted of a 32×32 tile into which polygons were rasterized across the image across multiple pixels in parallel. On early PC versions, tiling was performed in the display driver running on the CPU. In the application of the Dreamcast console, tiling was performed by a piece of hardware. This facilitated deferred rendering—only the visible pixels were texture-mapped, saving shading calculations and texture-bandwidth.

                            Microsoft Talisman (1996)

                            Dreamcast (powered by PowerVR chipset) (1998)

                            Gigapixel GP-1 (1999)[6]

                            Intel Larrabee GPU (2009) (canceled)

                            PS Vita (powered by PowerVR chipset) (2011)[7]

                            Nvidia GPUs based on the Maxwell architecture and later architectures (2014)[8] <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

                            AMD GPUs based on the Vega (GCN5) architecture and later architectures (2017)[9][10] <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

                            Intel Gen11 GPU and later architectures (2019)[11][12][13]

                            Examples of non-tiled architectures that use large on-chip buffers are:

                            Xbox 360 (2005): the GPU contains an embedded 10 MB eDRAM; this is not sufficient to hold the raster for an entire 1280×720 image with 4× multisample anti-aliasing, so a tiling solution is superimposed when running in HD resolutions and 4× MSAA is enabled.[14]

                            Xbox One (2013): the GPU contains an embedded 32 MB eSRAM, which can be used to hold all or part of an image. It is not a tiled architecture, but is flexible enough that software developers can emulate tiled rendering.[15][failed verification]

                            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_(microarchitecture)

                            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiled_rendering

                            https://www.techpowerup.com/231129/on-nvidias-tile-based-rendering

                            https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/joao-silva/nvidia-is-developing-a-new-multi-gpu-tiled-rendering-technique-for-turing-cards/

                              a month later

                              Jack
                              Thank you for not giving up trying to get to the truth.

                              Regarding my post CepheiHR8938
                              I must admit that I jumped to conclusions about the system with 3070 in one of the locations. I didn't have time to do a good test. Now I went back there and found that the discomfort is still there. Now I want to do more tests with different drivers and bios.
                              The case in the other location with the replacement of 730 to 1060 on the ryzen 2600 platform is still valid and there really helped with the bios downgrade.
                              I also want to share an interesting phenomenon after I bought a new 3070. Before installing the 3070, the system had a 1060. I did not scrub the system of the old drivers with a DDU or something similar. I just plugged in the 3070 and the system worked fine with the drivers that were installed for the 1060. No eye pain, and a great picture. Then windows decided to update the drivers on its own without my involvement. And everything got messed up. I was very angry, I decided to install back the version that was, but with an active 3070. And I was not able to go back to the previous state when everything was fine.
                              This led me to believe that the problem lies more in the plane of software and the mode of the driver, depending on the video card. But what exactly is to be found out.

                                  I have seen it suggested that it is sometimes an improvement if you do all updates first, and the driver last.

                                  Worth a try on a fresh partition or external drive.

                                  I just got a gigabyte m28u monitor, and its true 8bit. Maybe u want to try it. Works for me, at least its a second day i'm using it. Can't add anything more right now.

                                    5 months later

                                    So something interesting happened, i decided to update my BIOS on my EVGA Z490 Dark motherboard to test if a newer BIOS would allow me any more overclocking headroom and once i upgraded from version 1.07 released on 9/28/2020 to version 1.10 released on 11/11/2021 i started to experience eyestrain with my Quadro RTX 4000, even the BIOS screen had the strange smeared/glossy/blurry look that other bad cards ive tested had. I flashed the BIOS back to version 1.07 and everything went back to normal and is comfortable. I recommended anyone battling with a bad card to flash and test the entire range of BIOSes available for the motherboard.

                                    Maybe this could be caused by the GOP of the motherboard BIOS interacting with the GOP modules on the GPU in different ways and some work better with certain models of GPU's than others.

                                    https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/gop-update-and-extraction-tool-nvidia-only/91381/

                                    https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/amd-and-nvidia-gop-update-no-requests-diy/30917/923?page=36

                                    https://ledstrain.org/d/261-what-works-for-you-what-do-you-use-now-without-problems/187

                                    https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/display-port-gop-updater-guide-fix-blanking-screens-and-improve-monitor-compatibility.421417/

                                    My current Quadro RTX 4000 BIOS has UEFI version 5000B, i also found an older bios version of my card that has UEFI version 5000A, and a new version that has version 5000D. I bet if i wanted to use the newer z490 dark bios i could update my UEFI GOP and it would be normal.

                                    And here is a screenshot of a Quadro K4200 Kepler based GPU which is using UEFI version 1002F.

                                    In a case where it was not possible to make a bad GPU comfortable by testing various different motherboard bios versions it would certainly be worth a try changing GOP versions in the GPU's vbios until a comfortable one is found.

                                      I'm not sure if it's worth experimenting with flashing away to find new combos that work, when you already have a combo that works today.

                                        Sunspark I have an identical second system im working on that uses the same model motherboard so ill work on making the RTX A4000 Ampere based card comfortable, so ill be able to test all these possible combinations soon. My Quadro RTX 4000 has a waterblock on it currently so its not so quick to swap it out to test in my primary system.

                                          @Jack I hope you find something interesting here because I can say with 100% certainty now that the issue is baked into the goddamn motherboard and it somehow infects every card that it touches. I have a system that was working for me for years without eyestrain, I fucked it up installing a 970 from another system causing it to dither horrifically now. I have replaced everything in this system except for the motherboard and the horrific dithering is still there.

                                            Jack

                                            I realize this isn't trivial, but if I were in the same situation I'd get a lossless capture card setup on another computer and actually compare the raw frames between a "good" and "bad" firmware configuration with the same GPU and motherboard between them (Can be done with my VideoDiff software). Very quickly this would lead to empirical evidence what's wrong and (hopefully) can be sent to the "right people" in the right places for (potentially) a solution.

                                                If you think you have a bad motherboard that is doing something to every card you plug in, then stop plugging cards into it. Get a new motherboard.

                                                BloodyHell619 What model motherboard do you have? Try flashing the original release bios version to it and if the release bios doesnt fix it flash a version of the bios that has a release date as close as possible to the release date of the graphics card or the date of the vbios. If your motherboard model doesnt have a lot of bios version to select from then save a copy of your GPU's original vbios and use the GOP update tool to change the GOP version inside the vbios file and flash it to see if fixed the issue. Use "nvflash64.exe --version romnamehere.rom" to check which GOP version your vbios has and select one that is the same size as the original to add into the vbios file.

                                                @JTL I do want to pickup a lossless capture card but the only model that seems to be lossless is the DVI2PCIe, i wanted to check if there are other lossless PCI-e capture cards available but if not i will pickup DVI2PCIe to get some actual captures of a bad setup and good setup.

                                                • JTL replied to this.
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