AGI A couple of questions. I noticed that the IT staff did not bother updating the BIOS version and that there is a firmware update pending. Any chance updating everything may make the screen smoother?
Is PWM directly/indirectly affected by OS updates or is solely an hardware parameter? Thanks.
Sucks that you got called in, though it was pretty inevitable. At least it took awhile.
Yes, it is entirely possible that a firmware update may make the screen smoother, I have observed this with an old video card. My opinion, given that you're suffering already and going back isn't an option anymore you might as well try it and see how it goes. It's not going to be worse at this point and might be better. You won't be able to roll-back though.
However, before doing that, there is something you can try.. try f-lux or night light and make the screen orangey-reddish, also at the same time, turn on greyscale-mode in the windows settings colour filters.. that should give you a warm white point without any other colours. See if doing that first helps make it more comfortable. Night light is built into Windows, I think f-lux's tonal balance is better. In lieu of using either, you can also go into the video driver settings and just simply lower the G and B sliders and it will do the same thing (but still also turn on greyscale). The theory here is that maybe you're being oversaturated.
PWM is both. It can be off in hardware but turned on by software. Sometimes it's other stuff, for example In linux kernel 6.6 for Intel, they're going to turn on panel self-refresh. It was off for many years because it was so buggy it couldn't be used, only in Windows. Will be interesting to see how that goes.
That reminds me, if your screen is PWM, if at 100% it is too bright but lowering it causes PWM, one way you can work around that is leave it at 100% but again, go into the video driver properties and lower the R G B sliders, say to 50%.. this will 'dim' the screen, but the backlight will still be at 100%, presumably not as much PWM but not so glaring.