For me, only GTX 965M works without eyestrain. I have it currently on my 10 year old ASUS G752VL Republic of Gamers, 17 inch laptop.
I have the usual eyestrain, brain fog, headache and other symptoms that most of the people here on the forum have.
So far, I tested these GPUs on 8 laptops and they are all bad for me:
GTX 1060 - bad
GTX 1660 - bad
RTX 2070 - bad
RTX 3090 - brutal
RTX 4090 - bad
MacBook PRO M1 + M2 - pure punishment
Integrated graphics only, no GPU (eg. Intel UHD Graphics) - brutal
In my case, it doesn't matter the laptop screen, external monitor or the windows version. All the GPUs that are not on Maxwell architecture (eg: 9 series) are bad for me. After Maxwell, they added temporal dithering on all GPUs.
I tested around 13 versions of windows 10 and 11 on RTX 3090, and without exception I got a bad headache and eyestrain. Linux is even worst. I also tested a lot of nvidia driver versions, without success. I did all these by reading various posts here on the forum. I also tried to connect to my RTX 3090 laptop from my GTX 965M laptop via remote connection software like Team Viewer hopping that the bad signal from 3090 will get "washed" in the streaming and being replaced with the signal from my 965m but it didn't work. I still got eye strain. I tested 5 such software.
I even bought a desktop system with RTX 3090 in which I added a second GPU, GTX 980. I connected my monitor to the 980 hopping that I can force the software and games to use the RTX 3090 even though my monitor was connected to the "safe" 980. It didn't work! The games didn't start and more importantly, the software for my work (eg. ComfyUI) didn't start if the cable wasn't connected directly in 3090.
The only setup that works for me is like this:
The GPU must be GTX 965m or GTX 960m (yeah, I know, 10 years old, only found in 10 year old second hand laptops)
The signal output coming from GPU to monitor must come via GPU and not the integrated card. This is crucial. For example on these laptops that I tested (all with GTX 965m), Surface book 1 and Dell XPS 15 9550, the display is hardwired to the integrated card and not the GPU, which ended in a serious headache, even though the GPU is safe for me. On my Asus, the signal to monitor comes directly from 965m and I have no issues.
The monitor to have at least 75hz refresh rate. On my gtx 965m laptop, if I switch to 60hz refresh rate, I get mild symptoms which turn into a headache after a few hours.