Hello,

I am glad I found this forum. Apparently it's not only me that is experiencing issues with modern displays.

I have a Dell Precision 5560 laptop. It has a 4K touch display. The integrated video card is Intel Iris Xe Graphics. The dedicated one is NVIDIA RTX A2000. From what I've read the dedicated card is just a co-processor and just helps the integrated one. At the end, the Intel video card renders on the laptop display or external display. And there's no way around that. The OS is Windows 10 21H2.

When I am using the laptop display I get an eyestrain and a headache. This is from very little usage - 20-30 minutes. Then, the pain could last for hours. I get a similar effect when I use an external display that I usually do no have any issues with. An old Dell - S2340L. I do not see anything unusual on the display of the external monitor (blurry fonts, odd colors) - it looks perfect but it gives me eyestrain after an hour of usage.

As for the laptop display - it feels like my eyes are constantly trying to focus. This is the first 4K display I am using and that might play some role.

Generally - I have had some discomfort looking at IPS external monitors in the past. But there have always been monitors that I am fine with. I have always been fine with laptop displays. Zero strain. I have used Dell, Acer, Lenovo, etc. Usually the setups have been Intel Integrated Graphics and Nvidia card. So, pretty similar. Also, LED bulbs give me eyestrain so I use mainly incandescent bulbs.

The laptop is from work and it has a security software on it. My goal right now is to make this thing work with an external display somehow without giving me eye discomfort. Stuff I tried:
- Installed the latest drivers for both cards and everything else (BIOS, etc.).
- Disabled dedicated NVIDIA video card
- Played with the settings of the Intel card (they are pretty limited)

These were of no help. I haven't tried to uninstall the drivers of the integrated video card - from what I read I won't be able to use external monitor if I do this. Also, I think Windows would install drivers immediately. What do you guys think about that?

Other thing I am currently reading about are eGPUs - external GPUs. They seem to be a pain to setup but if I could use my own video card somehow, I'll be able to resolve the issue I think. Problem with that besides the price is that it's a limited secure machine and I can imagine what would happen if I try to add a video card to it. I see this as a last resort.

I do not think it's worth to try other monitors - the issue is definitely not the monitor. Also, I cannot try the dithering app that is so popular in the forum since it's an unlicensed software. I can only install a licensed software on the machine.

If you have any other ideas - I am open to try anything. Thank you.

I highly doubt any external video card will help. The problem is likely originating at the OS / firmware level so no matter what you use to render the display, or what you render it on, you will have the same results.

Have you tried patching? Try covering each eye with an eyepatch and see of that helps.

a month later

Hey folks,

Giving an update and a little bit more thought on dithering by Intel.

As of now, I am not able to resolve the issue and switching jobs seems inevitable. Currently, I am not using this laptop for work but soon I'll have to switch to it. Which won't be possible with that pain.

About eye patching - I might try it just to see whether it has an effect. It still seems to me that it could mostly help diagnose yourself with a binocular vision issue rather to work like that 8 hrs a day.

New stuff that I tried:

  • Connecting through VGA. I used USBC-VGA adapter. Fonts are too degraded and it's not an option. Haven't spent much time testing it for dithering since it doesn't seem to be usable anyway.
  • Bought an eGPU setup - Razer Core X enclosure and GeForce GTX 1660s. I am going to keep it since I might need it. eGPUs are a solution if you identified your issue to be a certain video card. It needs Thunderbolt 3 or 4 and connects to the motherboard directly via PCI Express. So, your iGPU and dGPU get completely ignored. It's tricky to set up but it should work. Back to my trial - as I suspected it is not allowed to plug in eGPU because of security reasons. Talked to support and explained my issue and why I need it but they didn't take it seriously and told me to speak to HR. Which I most probably won't do. I can't blame them, they most probably haven't heard such a complaint before and they gave out hundreds of these machines. Or they simply don't care. Anyways, this option is out of the window.

RDP to the machine is done in a finicky way via browser - I am going to try it but I don't think RDP would be suitable for work 8h/day either. Regular RDP is forbidden and projecting your display wirelessly is also forbidden.

There's not much else I can do at this point besides looking for a new job.

I read a little bit more on dithering techniques used by Intel from this whitepaper on Deep Color Support. It seems dithering is done in a more complex way that I originally thought. Yes, the article is from 2015 but it pretty much shows their way of thinking - sacrificing everything else to get the best color at any time.

Take a look at one of diagrams showing what they called "exclusive mode app" back in the day that produces 10-bit (I guess in 2023 we have a lot of apps supporting higher than 8-bit - 10 and even 12-bit):

It seems it works in the following way - an application produces an output (it could be 8, 10, 12 bit) and the GPU driver decides what to do with it based on what OS gives as information about your display.

This practically means if there's an application that supports 10-bit or 12-bit, Intel are going to use dithering if you have an 8-bit monitor (my case). Guess what happens if you spend a ton of money on a true 10-bit monitor and you have application that supports 12-bit - you guessed it - they are going to use dithering on your 10-bit monitor to display 12-bit colors.

This explains why people are affected by Windows updates. This also explains why changing your monitor to a true 10-bit won't work. Changing your monitor to anything specific won't really work. Because this whole process works on a per-app basis - you can have eye strain and headache when using one app and none of that - when using another.

Only way of resolving that is to disable dithering somehow. It seems in theory that even OS could somehow interfere and make all apps produce certain bits to the video driver. Or the video driver itself might have an option to disable dithering. But changing monitors isn't going to resolve issues for all apps.

Honestly, from what I read so far, it seems 99.99% percent of people do not experience issues like we do. And if companies decide to implement solutions for this it won't be because of us. It's not justified to introduce and maintain such an option for so small number of people - everything is money and they would be spending way more than making on us. I hope I am wrong.

I want to thank everybody from this community - it's been really helpful to read some of the threads and get a bunch of ideas. Also, I would be visiting an optometrist soon based on recommendations from the forum.

I might post another update in future.

I have the same issues with Zbook 15 G8 Fury, Intel iGPU and nvidia A3000. Forced myself a day of trying to adjust to it and ended up feeling very bad, severe pulsating pain in the head, like it was held very tight and a very pronounced urge to vomit (sorry!). Tried 11 22H2 and 10 LTSC 2019. The pains and incomfort were really high.

    Did you try video capture card?

    Take hdmi output of the laptop into video capture card. On the other side, input this capture card into another system which is comfortable for you. Install obs studio or vlc and stream the video output in eye friendly system. This should be unblocked for your laptop since the video capture card will show as another external monitor connected to your laptop.

      7 days later

      ryans It does help a little bit, it lowers the pressure on the eyes. The colors look more washed out though.

      a month later

      Hey folks, I'm just giving an update what I tried. I still do not have to use the laptop, but that would change at some time I guess.

      brjdenis There is no such option.

      Alyosha2001 Sorry to hear that, mate. Hopefully it's not a work machine that you have to use.

      karthi3219 Thank you for your proposition. I actually decided to buy such a card to try that. Perhaps, I should have invested more time in reading before buying. So, I bought AVerMedia LIVE Gamer ULTRA to try this out. I used it via OBS. It was a struggle to get it to work with 1920x1080 at the beginning. I got it to work, but the quality is bad - it does encoding/decoding and you're losing quality. Other problem is the latency - it's very high and it makes it unusable. I played with their application, too and couldn't improve the quality or the latency. From what I read, you have to buy a high-end card which could cost a bunch of money. It should be used via PCIe and support transferring the raw video without encoding. And even then you'll have latency. I could potentially get it to 2 frames, which I suspect will be noticeable. So, to really try this I'll have to build a PC and buy a high end video capture card from Magewell, Blackmagic or something similar. Not sure whether I want to do this just for the trial. Can you please tell me what is the setup you are using and how is the quality and the latency? This seems in theory a really good idea, not sure how practical it is for our use case.

      I tried with Microsoft Display Driver - what happens is you can't control the brightness, also I can't get my external monitor to work with HDMI - it looks like it doesn't support HDMI. I could probably try with some kind of a privacy filter for the laptop display - they could potentially make the screen darker and maybe usable.

      I am still not sure how many bits the laptop display is, this is some kind of a serial number or something for the display - NC75F. It's a 4K touch display.

      What I saw in the settings of the Intel video card is it supports VESA Adaptive Sync. I wonder if I hook up the laptop to an external display that supports that the dithering would be affected in some way. Do you know?

      Also, I think I'll post a thread in Intel's forum to ask them are there any circumstances under which the dithering would not kick in. That should be answered by an engineer working on a driver. Chances for my inquiry to be escalated to such a person are low but I'll try my luck.

        Firemaker What sort of eye strain are you having? Are your eyes burning? Do you have red eyes with visible blood veins?

        12 days later
        dev