I thought so, too, but I'm not sure yet. What I realized so far is that a fresh 1511 ISO install felt better than a fresh 1607 ("anniversary"). But that could have multiple other reasons so I'm not sure at this point.
Windows 10 Anniversary Edition
I'm not really surprised to see this question. It is the same with Windows 7. Some of the updates involved GDI and I could see the difference. So yes, there are multiple moving parts, video driver, OS rendering components, and the firmware. Change a driver and it's a little different, leave the driver and put in specific OS updates and it's a little different, etc. It's part of why I stopped giving a crap about Windows updates. This issue is not specific to Windows, it is every operating system. It is the same with motor vehicles. You can get "good enough" or you can orient the sparkplugs "just so".
Windows 10 is also a political football due to forced updates that can break stuff like DHCP this month, and the cloud monitoring business. Will be interesting to see how enterprises deal with things when 7's extended support ends in 2020. If they'll go to 8.1, or look for something else.
19 days later
I didn't like the switch in 8.0 to software compositing, it leads to a whole host of issues that can crop up with MS making some kind of change irrespective of the drivers. It got worse in 8.1, then in 10, and now in Anniversary it's pretty much bad all the way around, even on otherwise good cards. I don't know how nobody else sees this... SOMEONE in the beta testing group, or the dev team, has to be able to see the trash they are outputting. 
There's really something wrong with Anniversary Edition. I tried it again, this time with my old Quadro card, and it was awful. Burning eyes, at the verge of a headache. The next day, now with Windows 7 SP1 (without any updates yet) it's much better.
I have reverted to pre-Anniversary. At some point they're going to try to make me update at work, and I'll have to get pretty adamant about not doing so... luckily I'm in the IT department so I can buck the trend a little...
Right now my older laptop is running Windows 7 SP1 (latest patches) flawlessly, and my newer machines are running Windows 10 pre-anniversary. And I'm doing ok for now.
How can we make MS aware that they broke something serious in Anniversary with compositing?
5 days later
With the broad low level strain I've been experiencing across multiple Nvidia video cards I'm mighty tempted to try a Windows 7 install instead of my Win 10 Anniversary setup(s). I just want to eliminate the OS as having changed something,
AgentX20, I'd just drop back to Win10 non-anniversary. Easy enough to get the ISO (or just roll back through Windows Update). I am sticking with Win7 for any hardware that is well supported in Win7, and Win10 pre-anniversary for anything that requires Win10.
Cheers I'll look into rolling back. Might save some hassles... or could go horribly wrong!
I'm also going to pick up a spare SSD for the wife's laptop that I'll use for a trial Win 7 test if required.
Looking forward to your results on the rollback AgentX20.
Unfortunately, I cannot rollback Windows 10 easily. A clean start fresh makes for a massive reinstall job.
First up I'm going to try a parallel Win 7 installation onto a blank SSD over the weekend...
AgentX20 - PM me, rolling back Windows 10 to a previous build is actually pretty simple unless you are running a corporate-controlled machine. It's a single click and reboot.
21 days later
I've determined at this point that the problems with anniversary edition persist even through an RDP session - this means something is actually badly broken in the primary desktop composition system. WTF, Microsoft?
- Edited
Gurm I don't have Win10 but there is something worth trying since you are the admin. Edit the client UI preferences or the registry to change the colour bitdepth under session bpp. You can actually go as low as 15-bit. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee483491(v=winembedded.70).aspx Remember to restart session after every change.
It's interesting.. I wonder if RDP has something to do with windowed or exclusive mode as well as Direct3D. I know when it comes to playing video the video people pay a lot of attention to framerate of both the monitor and the video and have observed different results with different D3D versions as well as the mode of the window. I doubt it is FRC travelling over the connection as that would waste bandwidth. It has to be something the application is directed to do on the local end.
So along that end I see there is also a registry key FullScreenRFXOnly where the client will use hardware-assisted mode or windowed GDI mode. Also worth a look at too.
5 days later
Actually I just found a machine running Anniversary Edition that DOESN'T hurt my eyes. It uses onboard Intel graphics from an old Intel Core2Duo, over DisplayPort to a dell monitor.
I'm going to pull the model number of the monitor and the model of the Intel integrated graphics. This is surprising and unusual... I wonder if it really is a driver issue still? I just wish we knew WHAT was happening on the screen that made it unusable!
Games running "Fullscreen" do not give me eyestrain in Win10 AE. Fullscreen (Windowed) and Windowed give me problems.
It has to be the window composition system, but... uh... what?
Here's why:
"When an application runs in fullscreen mode, it runs in "exclusive mode". That means it has full and direct control over the screen output.
But when it runs in window mode, it needs to send its output to the window manager (windows explorer) which then manages where on the screen that output is drawn. This takes some additional performance. The performance penalty, however, is greatly reduced in newer version of windows."
- Edited
Yeah. The Window Manager has several window composition steps. It looks like they are doing SOMETHING that wigs out our eyes in the latest iteration of it. But only on SOME hardware - certain hardware that is old enough is unaffected, probably because it doesn't support whatever shortcut the system is trying to take to make that penalty "greatly reduced".
Using fullscreen in games is becoming harder as a workaround because many games now when selecting the "Fullscreen" is actually windowed with no borders.