- Edited
OK, so let me tell you the full story, it is not that long anyway.
Recently I came across an old game that is currently on offer, game that I played in the 90s, bought it to bring back some good old memories. After running the game on my laptop I immediately noticed the picture of the game itself was not stable, but what is more: after shutting the game down I noticed my laptop's screen was not "stable" either - not that bad as the game, but still it was not the "perfect" screen I've been using for the past years.
However I could not believe it could really "damage" the screen - OK, so it's using temporal dithering I thought (as we all usually say here) and well, what could it do to the screen? But the screen was not OK and I was again testing the game several times to see if I am just imagining things (which as I later learned was making it only worse).
However it was weird that such a game run in an emulator would be using temporal dithering. I have always thought that video timing could have some impact so after many years I finally started looking into NVidia timing settings and tried some of the other timing algorithms. And to my surprise the screen started flickering and it was getting worse and worse. And it stayed like that even after removing the new timing and reverting all the changes back - obviously what happened was that some subpixels did not have their inversion properly timed and parts of the image started to be burned into the screen matrix and most of the screen was heavily flickering. Although the screen looked severely damagedit started to recover slowly as the pixels were no longer stressed by one polarity only. Burned in images disappeared and flickering was getting better. When it reached only tiny, almost unnoticeable flickering that mataches exactly the symptoms I usually get from screens. it was exactly that picture, that feeling. This is the state the screen is in now. I can see it's not alright, but noticeable flickering is gone.
Additionally it confirms that the game above running in full screen definitely impacted the screen due to incorrect timing - every fullscreen application is capable of setting refresh rate from scratch. The effect was very similar to what I saw with changed nvidia settings, of course with much smaller effect. And what I saw in that game was again exactly what I am used to when recent video cards are "unacceptable" for me. The picture is somehow unstable. It's like the picture is there and not there at the same time.