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).

    a month later

    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?

      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.

        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.

          10 days later

          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.

            7 days later

            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?

              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? 🙂

              • glvn replied to this.

                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 ..

                  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!

                  16 days later

                  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.

                    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.

                    9 days later

                    You know what I'm just thinking now? Maybe it wasn't the dual GPU trick that fucked up my system in the first place. I got my gtx 970 back from my friend and so the card was on his system with a very recent mobo. maybe his goddamn mobo infected the card and it got passed on to my mobo. If there is 1 thing thats for sure now its that the mobo is the god damn defect.

                    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.

                      8 days later

                      maybe his goddamn mobo infected the card and it got passed on to my mobo

                      That is not possible.

                      A BIOS upgrade itself won't do anything to a video card. However an upgrade can change settings. Have you gone through every page and tried every setting in the Bios? particuarly anything to do with PCI-e timing or anything related to video card voltages

                      I've been getting various messages from a couple of games about how my vulcan graphics driver was too old (Win 10 1511, 970 card and driver version 391.55). Now this has been a good strain-free setup for a long time now, apart from it starting to age out re various bits of software and eye strain with a few Unity games.

                      But I've got backups… so I thought just this one time I'd try a newer driver… 411 something… uh-oh eye strain feelings detected. So I pushed on trying another even newer driver version 441.12 or similar. It still felt a bit off - those games were running though.

                      Sadly after a couple of days I knew this wasn't going to fly with creeping eye strain. Next, I rolled back with a bare metal restore from backup. And… it STILL felt off. Yikes. I've tried a few more sessions and the eye-strain is definitely there and significant.

                      Everything's exactly the same as a week before my driver shenanigans. But now there's eye strain. You start to wonder what those newer drivers did to my graphics card.

                      So all I can try now is a full ground up reinstall of 1511… (fingers crossed)

                      I really am my own worst enemy. I KNEW I shouldn't have messed with my setup. But sometimes you can't help but get so damn tired of all the eye strain everywhere and not being able to run big screens, big graphics cards, and better mobos/cpus.

                      But it DOES make you wonder what kinds of settings can 'stick' on your graphics card, much as has been discussed in this thread.

                        6 days later

                        So I've now done a ground up OS installer rebuild of my PC - exact same hardware and using the same Win 10 1511 OS installer as was working OK for me before.

                        Sadly, I am still getting bad eye strain. The eye strain is even evident on a pure 1511 install before ANY (1511 related) patches are installed.

                        I am now utterly convinced that a new Nvidia driver HAS changed something fundamental in my graphics card.

                        I did try reflashing both VBIOS with the same version so see if that helped but no joy there.

                        I'm dejected… and my only hope is that one of my spare 970s doesn't exhibit the same problems. Trouble is they're in live PCs that are running the newest graphics drivers, so I'm not optimistic.

                        • glvn replied to this.

                          AgentX20

                          Sadly, I am still getting bad eye strain.

                          I did try reflashing both VBIOS with the same version so see if that helped but no joy there.

                          I have one stupid, weakly reasoned idea 🙁

                          Reflash the MB BIOS (not VGA) at least to the same version. Some people in this forum claimed that flashing the MB BIOS to an older version helped them. I assume that it could have helped them not to reflash the old version firmware, but the flashing procedure itself (this is based on my old experience, when the firmware update procedure could additionally clear the service areas of the BIOS, like DMI...)

                          This is a very big assumption for modern UEFI BIOS, but I have no other assumptions: where which ones can be saved settings when completely reinstalling the OS.

                          To be completely sure of the purity of the flashing, it would be a good idea to buy a clean BIOS chip and flash it on a hardware programmer (this is a lot of trouble, don't go down this path if you haven't done something like this before). This may be necessary, since I am almost sure that updating the BIOS in the standard way is does not provide a 100% guarantee of rewriting all UEFI modules/areas. I don’t know if I was able to convey the main idea with my English...

                            dev