I bought Razer - Core X Mercury. But you can use another enclosure. The important bit is the video card you are going to put in it. Pick any video card you have no issues with. Also, the laptop should have a thunderbolt port. And most importantly, IT should authorize this.
This will resolve your issue given it is related to the video card you are currently using.
Hey, I am in the same boat. Work laptop with Iris Xe that is not usable whatever I try. With the difference that they do not care and would not do anything to propose an alternative.
For the dithering - it might not be the thing that is bothering you. If you have an access to a personal laptop with that card, try it.
What I can offer is the following - try with eGPU. If you have a GPU that you are sure you do not have any issues with, it is possible to "attach it" to your working laptop and let it do all of the rendering fully bypassing any video cards the laptop has. For this to happen, you need your laptop to have thunderbolt ports. Also, you need IT to allow you to use PCIExpress (in a corporate environment this is generally forbidden for obvious reasons - you can essentially connect any external hardware to your motherboard). But since they actually understand you have issues and are willing to cooperate, they might give you an exemption. Also, you'll need to install drivers for your external video card but this isn't a shady unlicensed software so it shouldn't be a problem either.
Before going to the eGPU route, make sure you have full authorization from IT. For example, I did it without asking IT and realized it is forbidden but I have already spent a bunch of money on an eGPU enclosure. Also, keep in mind setting this up is tricky and will require efforts. Having an eGPU isn't so streamlined and OSes need some tweaking - you'll have issues with bitlocker and other stuff. Once you set it up though it's not a big issue.
Ditherig should work on external displays if you use your Intel card to render on your external display. You likely have a second video card that do the rendering on external displays.
Hey,
Since you are swapping cards, it seems you are not using laptop but a desktop machine. From the cards that still could be found on the market and should be good - GeForce GTX 1660s.
For the KB5034763 - I looked through the changes they disclose - none of them seem to be related to graphics. From the list of the file changes (I'm not sure I'm looking at the right place) - they are more than 50k. I doubt all of these files have changes since this is a monthly update. I suspect most of these files have their versions updated, but not the logic in them. To confirm these files really have updates, you can go ahead and get the list of the last monthly update before this one. And to compare their size. Again, please don't rule out anything else. Could it be some other update of something else like drivers? Could it be change in your surroundings - new lamp/bulb?
ensete Hey mate, sorry to hear you have issues and your work is on the line. Does your company started moving to Windows 11? If so, that maybe something you could try it. It'll be wise to try it on a personal machine before doing so on a work machine. Whether it would have difference or not is hard to tell.
I'm curious, what video card do you use? If you are in a secure environment and using the latest stuff, you are most probably using a newer video card.
Also, what monitor do you use, and with what cable (HDMI, DisplayPort, etc.)?
Looking at the release notes for that update - nothing related to graphics. It must be a bug fix or something. Or, they introduced a bug.
Did you really confirm KB5034763 is the culprint of your issues?
Hey mate. ChatGPT tends to make things up. Do we have any source of that claim? Also, these cables with these versions would be extremely hard to find I think.
I have read somewhere about this and they certainly have less bandwidth. It could potentially work. But still, finding such a cable would be very hard.
The iGPU would be the Intel Integrated Video card I suppose. You would most likely experience symptoms. If you do, you can try disabling dithering with ditherig. Another older card that is still available for purchase and it is generally considered symptom-free by many folks is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super.
Hey folks, I am aware that some motherboards might cause issues for us. I am about to build a desktop PC and I wonder which motherboard brand I should pick to minimize the chances of getting my eyes affected. Do you have any modern brands you've had a good experience with?
I do not see any changes that might affect us in the release notes. So, most likely you are not experiencing issues because of that particular Windows Cumulative update.
I found the source of this statement. Thread is here.
It seems the statement is partially true but it is still promising. Intel says it disables dithering for 6bpc external displays connected via DisplayPort. Funny thing is they contradict themselves about the reasons - firstly they say it impacts accuracy, secondly they say such displays simply do not exist.
Event though these are older drivers and older video cards, there shouldn't be a reason this rule won't be valid even now.
Anyways, that is a pretty good lead. I'm curious now. I think I'll burn some more money and look for a second-hand monitor to play with. I'll keep you posted.
jordan It appears there are different ways of doing that. It's easier with modern monitors. I think I might purchase an older monitor just to test this. I'll post in that thread if I decide to do that.
Elever Yes, 8 bpc is 8-bit color depth. I agree, I don't think there are many consumer monitors that have true 6-bit colors if any. Maybe such displays would be used by some specialized medical or defense equipment, who knows. With a great level of certainty I think there is logic in all of the video drivers how to handle 6 bpc internal and external displays.
GZunit Hey mate. Yes it is most likely the Intel Iris Xe graphics card. If this is a personal laptop, could you please try with the application ditherig and let us now whether it alleviate your symptoms when using external displays.
I have a work laptop with this video card (fortunately I don't have to use the laptop for now). I can't find any solution. If this is not a personal laptop, you can safely work around the issue by using eGPU (before purchasing make sure IT allows PCIe over Thunderbolt). That setup would allow you to completely skip any video cards you have and use a video card of your choice.
If this is a personal laptop and ditherig does not work for you, consider selling it.
Good luck, mate.
Hey folks,
I stumbled upon something. Some of you are aware of an older app that used to disable temporal dithering for Intel video cards. It's called igfxtweak. This isn't maintained anymore and nowadays folks from the forum use ditherig.
In that older repository it says:
Intel intentionally disables dithering and FRC for external displays with <8bpc.
This is very odd and doesn't make sense. Does somebody know something about that? Do they really use to disable it? And why? Not sure what is the source of that statement. And if that was true back then, what are the chances this is valid now?
I am thinking maybe I can edit the display EDID of an 8 bpc monitor to appear as if it is 6 bpc. And that could potentially disable dithering. Colors would be worse, but I don't care about colors. What do you think?
Best regards.
Hey folks,
Decided to make a new thread just for that question.
As I mentioned in another thread, I have a problematic laptop that uses Intel Iris Xe Graphics video card that dithers and gives me massive eye strain and headache on any screen (internal or external). Can't install ditherig because it's a work machine.
The user @karthi3219 proposed to me to use a video capture card to capture the HDMI output of my laptop and to display the video on another PC/laptop that has a 'good' video card. I bought a gaming video capture card (AVerMedia LIVE Gamer ULTRA) to test that but it was with terrible quality and high latency. And I am using 1080p with 60 hz monitor. Now, I am thinking of building a PC and buying a more expensive PCIe capture card (from Magewell or Blackmagic). But before I burn more money trying to find a workaround to this issue, I want to confirm with you guys whether it's a good idea or not.
Questions:
Would such a setup work? Because in theory I am starting to think it shouldn't work - the video card capture device will capture the dithering, too. And the video will have the dithering effect. The difference would be one is HDMI signal, other is a video. So, maybe there would be a difference of how my eyes react to the video.
Is it possible that dithering could downgrade the quality of the video? I suspect this might be the reason why I get such a bad video quality with my current video capture card.
I will be very happy if @karthi3219 could chime in on the thread, too. Maybe he could give insight about his setup and how is the quality, latency and how about the dithering that is also being recorded. I am also tagging @Seagull since he has done some testing with video capture cards and has knowledge.
Thank you for your time.
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.
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:
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.
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.