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Gorfball

Long shot, but isn't A-FRC a type of software dithering occurring at the monitor (vs. OS/GPU)?

Only reason I bring this up: I had used two external monitors on my zbook forever. The laptop had 6bpc depth by default on its native screen, and that carried over to the external monitors. One day, I made the mistake of setting them to 8bpc, and the nVidia control panel wouldn't let me revert! Swore I had eye strain issues thereafter.

I swear a lot of these issues coincide with the move to 8bpc+, and a lot of monitors are not yet 8bpc native (it's 6+aFRC). I wonder if something similar happened here - defaulting to a higher color depth that forced flickering.

I have no idea if something native to the 8 bit color "palette" is what bothers my eyes or just the flickering that gets us there, but I suspect it has something to do with that on modern software & hardware. In any case, good luck :/

tfouto U2717HR I believe. It's a Dell. iirc 6 bit + AFRC. I tried native 8 bit monitors, too, to no avail. I swear Ditherig still works, but will test more when I'm home from holiday travel.

Blair Sorry to hear about your struggle, and welcome to this board. In general, it's a super informative place, if overloaded with those desperate for solutions (of which I am one). Welcome to the club, even if it's not one you had hoped to join

There are a dizzying number of potential triggers for everyone, so it's tough to track down. The usual suggestions are to avoid monitors using PWM (pulse-width modulation - flickering the screen to reduce brightness instead of having a backlight that can actually be dimmed), have good background lighting, sufficient distance and contrast between monitor and wall behind it, night shift / night light / blue light glasses, etc. I'm sure you've already pursued all of that.

One thing worth trying that you may not have yet tried: if you use a PC, install Ditherig. It's freeware that shuts off temporal dithering, which is pixel flickering to create in-between colors not in the monitor's native palette. A number of folks here are suspicious that's what bugs the eyes, and that it's become more common in the past few years. That + the things mentioned above + the general health recommendations (vitamin D / avoiding nutrient deficiencies + exercise + sleep) seem to help me. I just got a new Macbook Pro for work that seems to be bugging me still - I think the dithering is a thing on it, too, though I love the color temp adjustment of its "true tone" screen. But, Ditherig + blue light glasses seem to work on my home PC that used to wreck me.

In any case, best of luck. Hopefully you find your silver bullet; unfortunately, many here seem to find there may not be any one fix-all, but the cocktail of general health practices and avoiding abrasive settings/hardware make life tolerable.

Does anyone know whether Ditherig is supporting Intel 8th-gen processors? I think there was a very terse/generic note about Coffee Lake being supported and the install seemed to work. However, I'm still trying to tell the difference between settings on/off, and seem to continue to be symptomatic.

Using an i7-8700k and MSI 1070. White screens still look a bit funny to me and I think symptoms are starting to appear after an hour or so of usage

Was really hoping that the temporal dithering thing was the solution. Not sure I like this monitor on any device so I need to give one other one a go, but still disappointed and hoping there's an easy answer, yet.

JTL fair enough. I wish there was transparency from Intel on stuff like this. Sometimes, testing is the simplest solution. Others, though, I’d think would be better solved by addressing major changes in the drivers. Feels like “patch notes” should be available for that.

Also, I’d imagine color used in testing matters. White screens are the worst for me, as I assume they have the most depth of color?

Separately, do we know if image rendering has changed in the case of dedicated GPUs? Is there some sort of Intel passthrough / post-processing still happening on modern machines? Is there a way to disable the internal graphics entirely?

Definitely interested in staying in the loop. I've had largely the same issues with new displays, and swore for a while that it was some sort of dithering to do with 8-bit color. Just ordered a 15" MBP 2018 after upgrading to Win10 on my old work computer started to make me feel funny much the way my purchase earlier this year of a PC w/an 8700k/1070 did. Thought it might be a Win10 thing. Maybe not...

There's an extensive Intel thread on the issue here: https://forums.intel.com/s/question/0D50P0000490Nm4SAE/eye-strain?language=en_US

They allegedly did tons of testing and couldn't find anything, which is really discouraging. It seemed like they even took in the hardware of some users having issues and had it third-party tested. Really impressed with the diligence, if disappointed by the result.

Things that do seem to make things worse for me:
- 8 bit color depth
- Win10 (maybe that just =newer Intel drivers?)

Things that don't bother me at all:
- My iPhone X
- My old iPad Air (OG)
- My HP Zbook G3 before Win10 upgrade / with 6 bit default color depth. PWM for brightness reduction didn't even bug me here

I continue to feel like white screens look like they're moving on these newer machines. It's like looking at colorful static. I briefly see the same thing when looking away from them at a "normal" screen before my eyes settle. It's like something is preventing my eyes from properly focusing and forces squinting, drives headaches. A familiar tale, I know - just wanted to join this discussion here, as I type this on my day-old MBP that I want to love :c