Utterly lost for words... So my friend to whom I had sold my Gigabyte GTX 970 Gaming G1 bought a new graphics card a few days ago, and so I thought I'd get my card back from him as I didn't get strained by it, and it was still a good card. I have used this card for over 10 years. I have never had burning eye sensations, nauseous feelings or this horrid level of eye strain from it. I slam it in, and it is straining me so bad I have been close to vomiting twice. What on gods earth is freaking going on here?! :"( I am truly lost for words. Right now I have a Zotac GT 1030. This card is years newer than the GTX 970, and it doesn't give me the slightest eye strain. How is this freakin possible?! The thing that is crazy is I can see banding everywhere. I don't even freakin know what nvidia is making these cards dither for.

BloodyHell619 I have some ideas, but unfortunately seeing how I don't have a "bad" NVIDIA cared nor a test system in my lab at the moment, that is a problem for research. What I think could be the case is internal VBIOS settings and potentially per unit variance could impact the digital output quality of the GPU. Meaning not all cards of a certain series are blanket "bad". In addition certain differences between driver versions, motherboard firmware initializing the card and OS could influence things. But without the resources to test, it's just informed speculation

BloodyHell619 As I mentioned earlier it may depend on what has already been installed up to this point. https://ledstrain.org/d/1524-eye-strain-with-new-gpu/132 it makes sense to check on a clean system and also possibly experiment with the motherboard bios and drivers. Windows To Go I think it will be good chose https://ledstrain.org/d/2236-windows-to-go-is-a-good-way-to-test-builds I agree that it is a crime for nvidia to make and support a product this way. For example they definitely lost one customer in the form of me.

BloodyHell619 Make sure all those aspects are unchanged from the time this gpu didn't strain you : windows version (if possible with exactly the same drivers for everything not just gpu, and same feature and quality updates). I had cases where a windows version would look bad on a gpu-mobo and better on another gpu-mobo. exact same mobo (i mean the exact same not only the same model). Also same other components (memory and so on…) exact same screen same gpu driver same display port or hdmi cable depending on what you use same bios and firmware versions Try to clear the cmos to reset the bios to its original state and see if it makes a difference.

My question exactly: iare you using exactly the same setup as you used to use with it? At least HW wise? Is at least the same mobo?

machala T Liberator005 The exact same hardware as before! Exact same mobo, CPU, power, monitors, cables, … My bios and windows are definitely updated from then and so are my drivers it would be quite some hell to figure out what driver and Windows version I was using, and it just doesn't make sense to me that the 1030 isn't straining me while the 970 is. What's even more horrid is that I tried the dual GPU method where I plug my monitors into my 1030 and let my 970 do the workload and what happens is that even when I set my 1030 as the "high performance" card so that in the Windows environment the 970 doesn't do anything my eyes were still straining!! Like simply having that card in the system was making it dither! I tried adding these two lines to the registry DP_DisableDither TMDS_DisableDither and setting their value to 1 which from this article I read should disable dithering: https://docs.teradici.com/knowledge/how-do-i-turn-temporal-dithering-amd-graphics-card What was interesting was that after I added these and opened up "Calibration Tool", Enabling/Disabling dithering from there made no difference to the colour gradient. So these codes are definitely disabling some kind of dithering, but the card was still straining me like hell. The strain was maddening, I think it even makes my blood pressure go up. This morning I woke up with such eye strain, dizzy feeling and high blood pressure that I almost wanted to call my friend and have him come pick me up and take me to the hospital. My head feels like It's exploding right now. I pulled the card out and am gonna let my eyes rest a little and maybe do some more testing. I might try installing an older diver. I'm really starting to get the impression that something has gone wrong with me. I mean first my Galaxy Note 5 which I was using for 8 years and I could no longer use without massive strain after board replacement and now my 970. Could it be that once you use a device that has horrible dithering like the disgusting 3000 series graphic card line-up your eyes start seeing dithering, and they could no longer unsee it? I know I used to get eye strain from my Galaxy Note 5 and even the 970 back then, but it was only after days and days and days of 24 hour use. And it was never this kind of burning sensation or nauseousness. Just simple eye fatigue. I'm going to take my question onto Microsoft forums and Nvidia. This is really crazy, we would really have to start living in the jungle if this is the path that pretty much every tech company is starting to take. For now, I am going to spend a few days behind my system with the 1030 and this latest driver. If the strain goes on, I will try an older driver. If it is really a driver matter, it would be even more horrid. That means even the stuff that work for us will become outdated. The new Last of Us remake which actually crashes like crazy with the latest Nvidia driver (v531.41) gives a warning that my driver is outdated if I have anything lower installed.

I have an alternative explanation for everyone to consider. I keep a lot of my old hardware for spares, backups and the like. Its fairly common for me to return to an older device and find it causes me symptoms when previously it was fine. I do not believe the hardware has changed, but I know I have. My eyes and brain are getting older, whatever defect causes me these symptoms has either worsened, or my brain is less able to adapt to it. When I was a teenager I could recover from a bad migraine in hours, now in my thirties it takes days. Its a normal part of aging, the older you are, the longer it takes you to learn and for your brain to adapt and recover. Perhaps when you were younger, your brain could adapt to your GPU before you experienced symptoms. I know this opinion will be unpopular with many here, but it underpins how I treat my own problems. Knowing the problem is within me, I don't look for the problems with devices and software to fix. I instead consider, what can I do to help myself adapt to this device. Exercise stimulates the growth of new brain cells, so when I need to try to adapt to a new phone, I sit on an exercise bike whilst using it. previously it used to take me 6months of suffering to be able to use new phones without headaches and migraines. Now, with my exercise bike trick it takes me just a few weeks and much less pain. I found what I eat can have a big impact on my symptoms and health in general. Through trial and error I found that my body really doesn't like red meat, diary and other more specific things. I cut those things out of my diet many years ago and found that my screen intolerances stopped worsening. Infact, for the last three years my screen intolerance has actually been improving. I am hopeful that in another few years I will no longer have any issues with screens at all. So my advice for you, and everyone else. Focus your attention on yourselves, not the tech, and see how it works out. See specialists in eye health, see what you can do to improve your brain health, look at your diet.

BloodyHell619 It's also worth noting that it's hard to recognize a successful configuration for the eyes after a heavy, traumatic mode of work with. The eyes are already a little traumatized and disturbed and it seems that everything is bad, it takes time to recover, and you should not rush to conclusions. As an example, in order to assess the difference between the spirits are advised to smell the coffee.

Seagull To be honest with you, I am coming closer and closer to agreeing with you too. For me, after witnessing the strain from the 970 only 2 other theories remain: 1- The newer Nvidia drivers are making the cards dither. I will be able to tell this in a few days, if the 1030 strains me too with this new driver. 2- As I said in the previous post, maybe once you experience a very low PWM or really bad dithering or maybe by simply becoming too aware of their presence your brain can no longer unsee them, and it starts to focus on them no matter what, causing you unbearable strain. If this is true, it is pretty scary and could mean it might be irreversible. If these two theories of mine get thrown out of the window, honestly, only your explanation could be true. I have to admit, since the pandemic, I barely go out of the house ever. So it could not only be the fact that we have come to age and our brains are struggling to adapt, but it could be that too much focus on the screen and being in a small room for so long with the same life day after day has intensified my focus on these screens. Since as long as I remember, I got pretty bad eye-aches and headaches from bad screens. If my friends came over to play Fifa after 2 or 3 days of playing, I would get such massive eye strain and headaches that I would have to go in the room and tie my head up and sleep for a few hours to be able to play again. But that eye-ache and headache never came with burning and dull eyes, nauseous feelings, such horrible depression. So there is definitely something wrong with these devices, and we definitely aren't just crazy. I, too, have been trying to adapt myself with my Note 5 specially by trying to differ my focus from locking on the screen, I also try to go out of the house into our front yard and have my gaze on farther distances, do more exercises and have been trying to get out of my room, head and the screens in front of me more often in hopes of being able to adapt again. There's literally not a single new device that not making use of these techs. Our options are getting thinner and thinner. I'm gonna have my mom also try and contact a doctor in our capital city and see if maybe he can come up with any better explanations. The doctors here have literally never even heard about such things. It's like alien language to them. I'm wondering if it could have anything to do with having high blood pressure.

CepheiHR8938 I also want to add that I do not believe in the strong effect of dithering on eye strain, all my experiments prove otherwise. That it has almost no effect. There is some flickering going on here. And the flicker is not the backlight, but the rendering.

BloodyHell619 You need to be careful with thinking that you can't use anymore hardwares that you used to be able to use. Be aware that the software component plays a huge role, just a simple os update or whatever update on your galaxy note 5 may have made it unusable. I had 2 cases where updates made my phones unusable. I think you would be perfectly fine if you could use your hardware/software exactly as they were. But as you can see, software constantly updates and it's super hard to get the exact state you had. I have my laptop right now, and according to the nvidia driver I use, I get differently bad symptoms. 3 drivers, 3 symptoms or different sensations. From acceptable to untolerable according to the driver. There is another thread where someone couldn't use his setup anymore. It turned out it was just a Google Chrome update. Even websites have their own way of image processing. Look at youtube for example and see how more saturated it is. I remember youtube changed for me like some months ago. See the difference between an image looked on bing or on google. Open a white page (for ex google home page) in microsoft edge, google chrome, and firefox, place them side by side and observe by yourself the difference in white tone, the reds and so on.

Got back GTX 970 I used for 10y with no sever strain! Now.. Horrendous strain!

JTL

AgentX20 Dihterig theoretically has functionality for some AMD GPUs, but if it actually does anything with an implementation on a given chipset is a different question.

BloodyHell619

@AgentX20 Yes as @JTL said v2 of Ditherig now also supports some AMD GPUs.

@JTL @AgentX20 Do you or anyone else here know any AM4 socket AMD CPUs with integrated GPUs that don't dither at all?

By the way, today I tried one more thing which didn't work either. I installed Linux mint on my local drive and switched its driver to NVIDIA so that I get the dithering option and from there I disabled dithering, but it made no difference.

JTL

BloodyHell619 @JTL @AgentX20 Do you or anyone else here know any AM4 socket AMD CPUs with integrated GPUs that don't dither at all?

I've never tested those so I can't comment. Sorry.

Lauda89

BloodyHell619 I had a ryzen 1700 + RX480 that was perfectly fine with some W10 version like 1809 and previus and 21H1.
Then I tried to change the CPU and mobo with a ryzen 7900 and i am not able to use that system more then 30 minutes. I've tried to clone the old SSD in order to have the same OS / driver, tried different GPU the integrated one, RX480, 970, 1660 SUPER and 4070, nothing work for me.
I am convinced that the problem is the MB/BIOS.

BloodyHell619

Lauda89 This is what horrifies me. Even though I have placed my card in another system, and it still gave me eye strain, I feel like it's something I got baked into the motherboard that infects every card I put in my system and this is so devastatingly sad because I literally have to trash this pc and get a new one whole.

@Jack Yes sadly I have tried all those methods and registry hacks and sat behind my pc without turning my monitors off, but the disgusting pain was still there.

Jack

Just to make sure, check that the software dithering is 100% disabled through the registry since it has a habit enabling itself again, i noticed that with the Nvidia disable dither registry key that if your monitor goes to sleep or if you turn the monitor off and on again it will revert to temporal dithering. First disable dithering from the post here https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/nvidia-and-dithering-controls-how-to-enable.436621/ and then download ColorControl from here https://github.com/Maassoft/ColorControl. ColorControl will display your current dithering status and it will keep the settings locked in.

CepheiHR8938

BloodyHell619 Yeah, I confirm, I have faced with the same effect. As soon as I update motherboard painful BIOS or insert "infectious" video card and then I cant repair normal state as before. The only thing that helps is to restore previous state regarding components and firmware and then reinstall windows|OS and in doing so, you have to disable update system even down to disconnecting any kinde of network.

AgentX20

Any chance you could dig out an older firmware for your video card and refresh things at that level? (They can be rather hard to find these days, and it is complicated by some cards having not one but two VBIOS slots).

BloodyHell619

async Switched lightning setup in the room since the last time it worked fine? Move the computer by the window, test the devices outside.

Sadly it still strains me massively in day light and with no lights on at all.

AgentX20 Any chance you could dig out an older firmware for your video card and refresh things at that level? (They can be rather hard to find these days, and it is complicated by some cards having not one but two VBIOS slots).

Honestly I even tried flashing VBIOS's of other cards onto my card but it still made no difference.

So I had my brother bring me a CPU with integrated GPU compatible with "Ditherig", a Ryzen 5700G CPU hoping that I could disable the dithering using "Ditherig" but it made no difference. I am in utter aw and broke as hell. Whatever the heck is going on is at the motherboard level. The strain is also definetly there even in the bios screen. But What I don't get is why does my GT 1030 strain me when used in another system?

It feels so stupid to have to go and buy the exact same motherboard again. And there's so many factors to take into account as to how to set it up then. I'm really fucked up. Should I put my old CPU in it or my new one? Should I buy a new GT 1030 too? What a freakin hell of a situation….

I also used a microscope my brother brought me on my monitor to check for dithering and it clearly is dithering horrifically. Can't post the video here.

Tried the same monitor paired with my dads old laptop that doesn't dither and the monitor wasn't dithering.

I could almost see the screen dither and when I read text on it for many seconds afterwards I see after-images, horizontal lines crawlling down everywhere I look.

Garman

-double post-

Garman

AgentX20

I know for a fact, having bought and sold multiple of these video cards that they're not all the same. Of the dozen or so G1 Gaming 970 cards I've owned:
...

V1.0 hardware is a lottery - Hynix RAM is A-OK, and Samsung RAM is bad (they get sold too).

I was actually thinking about buying a G1 Gaming 970 after reading about your experience, but I must admit now I am a bit confused: In this thread you seem to state the opposite:

You may be right, but I have had multiple Gigabyte G1 Gaming cards, and there certainly seemed to be some sort of correlation.

All of them (2 or more) with Hynix ram caused eye strain.

All of them (3) with Samsung ram were OK.

So I am wondering are the Hynix or Samsung ones working for you?

AgentX20

Garman So I am wondering are the Hynix or Samsung ones working for you?

Sorry about the confusion. I hope my observations have been consistent after all…

I'm currently starting at a Hynix based 970 G1, so pretty sure it's the Samsung ones that I've found to be 'bad' (for me).

What's also important is to find V1.0 hardware. It's on the white box label and also on the card near the slot connector.

Garman

AgentX20

Thanks for the update. I was indeed able to find people selling this GPU, where the revision number was visible in the product image of the card, so a version with rev 1.1 should be easy to avoid.

What I was wondering: Is there any way to determine the memory type aside from running GPU-Z? Asking a seller to look for the revision number in case it isn't visible shouldn't be a big deal, but I am wondering if people will be willing to reinstall the card and take a screenshot with GPU-Z.

AgentX20

Garman I'm not aware of any way to work it out other than GPU-Z.

async

Switched lightning setup in the room since the last time it worked fine? Move the computer by the window, test the devices outside.

In my experience (from Mac at least) you can test with a lot of stuff by simply disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome and using that full screen for a while.

glvn

Lauda89

Then I upgraded the BIOS on the old motherboard with the intent of putting a 5800 on it and it became inusable as well, even going back through the BIOS.

I'm not entirely clear, did you manage to return to the old BIOS version?

could you please tell me the motherboard model, old bios version and new bios version?

Lauda89

glvn The MB is the Crosshair VI Hero. The BIOS that fuck up my good setup was the 8701, then i roll back to the 8002 (the starting point) and then i tried to roll back to something old like 1701 or something like that, i don't remember in this moment. Are you able to find the difference between 8701 and 8002? 🙂

async

Should be possible to downgrade the firmware on the gfx card.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/how-to-recover-from-a-bad-video-bios-flash.265939/

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=&manufacturer=&model=GTX+770&interface=&memType=&memSize=&since=

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=Uploads&manufacturer=&model=GTX+970&interface=&memType=&memSize=&since=

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/nv-uefi-update-x64/

glvn

Lauda89

then i roll back to the 8002 (the starting point) and then i tried to roll back to something old like 1701 or something like that

return to the old bios returned (normalized) the situation with eye strain?

Are you able to find the difference between

unfortunately no 🙁 I'm just trying to understand: if the version of the main BIOS affects eye strain, is it possible to definitely fix the situation by returning to the old BIOS?

for example, on the Intel platform, an unambiguous return to the previous version (by regular means) is not always possible: https://www.asrock.com/MB/Intel/Z370%20Pro4/index.asp#BIOS

"* User will not able to flash previous BIOS once upgrading to this BIOS version."

As I understand it, this is due to updating ME (Intel Management Engine) as part of the BIOS. What is the analogue of ME in AMD and whether this component affects eye strain is an open question for me ..

Lauda89

glvn No that PC is still not usable for me unfortunately. So now i am using the new PC 13700K+RTX 4070+W11 21H2 with patching my right eye, and is almost ok but still not usable with 2 eyes.

To downgrade the bios, I followed this guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwJS8-GTgRU

Using AFUDOS!

async

BloodyHell619 How about the power supply? Try plugging the computer and monitor directly into the wall if you're using some kind of multi extension cord.

Also consider trying a higher or lower monitor cable, test display port vs hdmi if available, or try changing hdmi or display port version on the monitor or bios. After digging into EDID and display driver suff on Mac I realized just how many different types of compression and changes can happen there, based on what bandwith or capabilities the graphics card and os thinks are worthwhile to use.

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