Batch file to turn off 8->10bit dithering in NVIDIA GPUs on Windows

[Chief Blur Buster]

Disabling Temporal Dithering on NVIDIA GPUs

There's a relatively new open source project (only 3 months old) to disable temporal dithering on NVIDIA product.

Normally temporal dithering is good. For most people. Temporal dithering is used to emulate 10-bit via 8-bit, where pixels can flicker (shallow flickerdepth) temporally over multiple refresh cycles.

I'm not prone to this eyestrain, but I know some of you are. Some people claim to have eyestrain by FRC/temporal dithering. Be warned, FRC is a common redherring (e.g. usually not the main underlying ergonomic issue), but you can experiment turning on/off to see if your eyestrain appears/disappears.

It's not as bad as DLP, but some people here in this forum -- are particularly super-sensitive to eyestrain from this factor. There may be an interaction involved (e.g. specific LCDs that amplify eyestrain from this), as there's a lot of interplay between LCD inversion flickers and temporal dithering flickers that can create amplified resonance flickers that (a few) may be eyestrained by. Lots of unexpected causes and effects in the industry that are overlooked by small QA testing teams that are unaware of the "1% niche causes of eyestrains"; would not be surprised.

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github.com/SLStyler/Dithering-for-Windows-Simple-BAT-
DISCLAIMER WARNING - I HAVE NOT VETTED FOR MALWARE - USE AT OWN RISK

MIT license, it's just a batch file. There appears to be a potential bug with it in Windows 10 versus Windows 11, maybe one of you can bugfix it.

In this case, this becomes a useful additional ergonomic tool to the "Over 100 ergonomic problems of pieces of glass called 'screens' that is imperfectly trying to emulate real life"

[MSIfanboy]

windows 11 23h2 version 22631.3007

[MSIfanboy]

someone also made this app https://bitbucket.org/CalibrationTools/ ... rc/master/

[rx7]

Haven't tried this yet but here's another!
https://github.com/Maassoft/ColorControl

Btw there seems to be hardware baked dithering in some GPUs that cannot be turned off. I have a bunch of GPUs I have to test. Supposedly the quadro rtx 4000 and 5000 are safe once using color control.

[dogelition]

I would recommend using either ColorControl or my own novideo_srgb (also on GitHub), as both use the proper NVIDIA APIs for querying the current dithering settings and configuring it per display. I'm biased towards mine, since the GUI is simpler and it starts up much faster than ColorControl (which has a lot more functionality!), but AFAIK both use the APIs in exactly the same way.

Note: Unless something has changed recently, you cannot properly configure dithering on a GPU output which is using DSC. The setting will only affect the left half of the display, while the right half will retain the default driver behavior (i.e. it will apply dithering in most configurations, excluding 8 bit full range RGB in SDR).

[rx7]

I would recommend using either ColorControl or my own novideo_srgb (also on GitHub), as both use the proper NVIDIA APIs for querying the current dithering settings and configuring it per display. I'm biased towards mine, since the GUI is simpler and it starts up much faster than ColorControl (which has a lot more functionality!), but AFAIK both use the APIs in exactly the same way.

Note: Unless something has changed recently, you cannot properly configure dithering on a GPU output which is using DSC. The setting will only affect the left half of the display, while the right half will retain the default driver behavior (i.e. it will apply dithering in most configurations, excluding 8 bit full range RGB in SDR).

I'll check yours out. Thank you!

That's good to know I didn't know that about DSC. Anyway to know if PC/monitor is using DSC. I have a OLED g8 odyssey I'm going to test which uses DSC I think above a certain Hz?

Edit: so full range 8bit SDR won't dither even with DSC? What about a true 10bit display with HDR disabled ?

[Kyouki]

Haven't tried this yet but here's another!
https://github.com/Maassoft/ColorControl

Btw there seems to be hardware baked dithering in some GPUs that cannot be turned off. I have a bunch of GPUs I have to test. Supposedly the quadro rtx 4000 and 5000 are safe once using color control.

This was awesome, thank you for sharing.

[rx7]

Not a problem! I haven't tested those Quadro RTX 4000/5000 myself but someone I know has with the dvi2pcie(think that's what it's called?) capture card and didn't see any dithering. I did buy the same capture card so I plan to test my other cards eventually