degen This is a bit unrelated, but has anyone noticed more eyestrain in certain applications?
Absolutely. Applications can use their own font and color rendering engines, and eye strain can be triggered by specific applications. Citrix is a big offender for me.
Windows 7 ABSOLUTELY renders differently. It uses the hardware renderer, for one - your video card is doing final window composition and also rendering fonts.
You know I am thinking a lot of our problems are coming from software rendering engines.
Look at the Intel issue: Driver version matters, so it can't be entirely hardware related. People have issues with individual applications. Hardware swaps between machines cannot always fix the issue, upgrades can render usable screens non usable.
One thing I know is that in order to keep costs down, hardware manufacturers try to push as much of the processing over to software vs doing it in hardware. It's cheaper and allows for updates over the products life. So the culprit may be some software rendering feature like sub pixel anti aliasing or color rendering.
Interestingly, as I think I posted the other day, I found a system running Windows 10 Anniversary that DIDN'T hurt my eyes. It was a Dell Optiplex 780, Core2Duo, with the integrated Intel graphics running via DisplayPort to a Dell monitor
Do me a favor check and see if the monitor driver is installed (see if it is using the manufactures ICC color profile vs the default Windows one). I have nearly cured my eye strain by adding that to my machine. And just to test, I removed the color profile, and even though visually nothing changed, I instantly got eye strain again. That color profile is telling the monitor to display colors a certain way, and the default Windows profile may be introducing additional dither or sub pixel manipulation