Eyestrain solved after 6 years and multiple panels - LG 32gk850g

Link Also dithering is such a faint flicker especially compared to say harsh led PWM flicker so things don’t add up when someone is sensitive to dither but completely fine with PWM.

I don't agree with this because PWM is the entire displays backlight turning on and off regularly...dithering is each pixel flickering on its own and creates a lot more overall movement as you can see from the Dasung videos @degen took. Even a static screen is "moving" and wiggling and always in motion. I would say seeing every background, object, letter etc moving constantly and independently via dithering would be more difficult for focusing and strain than strobing of a lightsource. Even incandescent bulbs flicker and nobody is bothered by that. Now I am not saying PWM or strobing lights don't bother anyone...I hate visibly strobing lights...but I do disagree that it's obviously much worse than wiggly dithering.

I also don't think the 6/8/10 bit progression disqualifies this theory since we don't know if something similar to @deepflame's experience was happening before where apps/OS's were requesting certain performance or panels were just not recognizing or capable. That's my theory as to ancient CCFL laptops don't tend to bother us...they simply aren't capable of responding to the requests for dithering up to fancier graphics...of course it could also be that the older software people tend to use on those older devices aren't 'asking' either.

This will be easy to test once someone can comfirm a way to swtich dithering on and off. It's either going to be a clear relief or not. For me removing PWM was not a clear relief and while I wanted to believe it and tried to push through it, PWM free panels hurt just as much for me.

Link In my mind it's not about brightness wrt to dithering..its about movement. Watch @degen's videos. You can see movement everywhere because the E-ink panel makes it visible unlike an LCD. If you were reading a book where the white backround and black letters were always moving a little bit and changing shades even a little etc it would be tiring and hard to focus on. I think this is what dithering is like for us but on a much larger scale since even what looks like a solid white background is really a bunch of wiggly points rather than a solid area. Compound that with fonts, images, video etc its constant movement and that's exhausting for the eyes. All that wiggling, movement, changing of colors etc are not obvious to the naked eye but are straining the visual system nonetheless. It's like "seeing" a solid white paper and when zooming in realizing its thousands of maggots crawling all over each other. We may not recognize that movement when zoomed out, but the eye muscles and brain do and are filtering it. We are already filtering out so much when looking at LCDs on a macro scale that this might just be the straw breaking the camel's back.

Obviously this is entirely speculation, the dithering IS there but it might not bother us at all...or it might be the root cause and all the other stuff like PWM/eye accomodation etc are just additive factors or triggered by it. People were positive PWM was the root cause as well. But we need to rule this out if nothing else and there isn't any other obvious theory that at present doens't have a definitive way to test.

deepflame I am no expert here but as he also thought the graphics card changes its graphics mode and enables dithering. I would suspect it is the color depth...

From another non-experts point of view it DOES seem a logical theory. And since we are never going to get every manufacturer and software maker to agree to turn dithering off or give us a switch...it seems tricking things into believing the needs can be met without dithering is the onloy sweeping approach possible. You have a reproducable relief within those apps...now we need to figure out how to get the OS to react like the apps and make this a system wide trick. I don't know if this is a plausible idea or not...tricking things into believing they don't need dithering, vs somehow blocking it.

hpst Yeah, I think it makes sense as every manufacturer is about HDR, high contrast, sharpness bla bla... And I think the hardware cannot deliver this completely yet so they need to help with software voodoo like dithering.
(yes, blue light and PWM are their own things but I think that we are in the HDR aera now where dithering/FRC plays a big role).

JTL So is this in line with how you were working to stop dithering? Or if not a workable approach? Tricking the system into believing a higher quality panel is used so it doesn't think it needs to turn dithering on?

JTL So do you think @deepflame's experience is a one off specific to his/her hardware and apps? Or logically reproducable in general with the idea that the system is requesting a certain level of color and that lying to the system (as his setup seems to be doing by saying its a 10-bit panel in a setting even if the hardware really isn't) would work on a macro scale? How would we proceed to determine this and then how would we extrapolate this to a larger solution like telling the whole system the panel is high bit to hope for the same response the apps are giving and not asking for dithering?

JTL If you know any way I could check it on a 6 bit panel running a linux distro please let me know. If there is some way to trick the OS into thinking the panel is 8-bit/10-bit etc etc to see if this stops the 6+2 dithering crap. This could be a real breakthrough tactic wise. I just don't know where linux makes this request..like is it in the various drivers? In @deepflame's case it sounds like the individual apps are requesting 10-bit and are accepting being told the panel is 10-bit by that software setting JUST for those app windows, thus not needing to dither (which I am not sure if its a Windows graphics setting or what). It's probably a lot harder than I am imagining...but it would be amazing if this was a viable way to get around dithering for now.

AgentX20 I wonder what's going on there...if its app/site dithering or something else. On my super old laptop which is myonly safe device those apps/sites don't strain me even though I can definitely tell they "look" different in some odd way now. Some sort of smooth/shiney/glowing effect that wasn't there before. Maybe my laptop is too old to do the dithering tricks or to do them as intensely so its just not bothering me. I don't have ANY modern hardware that doesn't suck so can't even compare sites/apps as everything on them strains.

hpst I just don't know where linux makes this request..like is it in the various drivers?

Monitors can report their bits as part of their EDID info they send to the computer. It can be faked. However, I'm not sure if this approach keeps blocking/faking the true EDID forever while the system is running. And it is a lot to read. I tried reading the monitor EDID some years ago and saw that my Dell U2515H reported true 8 bit while the BenQ EW2440L didn't report anything regarding his color capabilities. If software/drivers always respect that info is not clear. Some cards probably ignore it and always dither.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/kernel_mode_setting#Forcing_modes_and_EDID

KM @JTL I am clearly out of my depth but in @deepflame's situation he said a software setting on the GPU was set to "10-bit mode"...and even though the laptop's panel wasn't 10-bit this fooled the apps requesting it into believing they didn't need to dither to get that 10-bits so it sounds like the apps trusted the gpu and not the display?

IF trickery would even work universally, rather than having to make hundreds or more of individual panels to report false capability back to whatever is requesting that quality, my thought (again based in very shallow ideas and no programming ability so might be nonsense) was could we somehow come from the other direction and extrapolate what his gpu setting was doing (fooling the requesting apps so they don't bother to dither as they don't think they need to to achieve the 10 bits) to a higher level global behavior so when whatever it is in the OS that says "show the desktop and file system and everything etc in this quality and dither to get that quality if you can't natively do it" (just like the apps in his case, and which has to be happening somewhere in software since in just a bog standard distro makes 6 bit laptop panels dither to more colors right?) that we get a system wide change rather than app by app.

Is that just obviously stupid and I am too ignorant to how everything comes together for this to even be possible? What is it in linux for example that says what quality to display the graphical DE in and triggers dithering to get it? Is it the gpu driver? Xorg? As far as I know laptop panels are "dumb" and aren't making that choice internally like some desktop monitors can right?