Hi wondering if someone can help me with this. I hear Radeon gpu have temporal dithering enabled to ON by default. I hear temporal dithering can cause eyestrain and headaches. Can someone confirm if xbox one and ps4 do in fact have temporal dithering enabled and if so is there a way to turn it off. If I use a true 8bit display would that mitigate any dithering?
Bump?
It is a locked down ecosystem on both, so you don’t really have the ability to go in and change any of the rendering settings. Unless you install custom firmware and hack games.
You could make sure your tv is set to game mode. TVs can do quite a bit image post processing themselves.
And anyway, by temoraral dithering, do you mean flickering pixels between two colours to make it appear like it is a differnet colour, say if you have a limited colur pallette? No real need to do that anymore. They might do some temporal smoothing, which isn’t the same effect at all.
Yea thats exactly what I meant by temporal dithering. The flickering of pixels between 2 colors. Supposedly that is a form of flickering that can be troublesome. Supposedly I hear Radeon cards in general have temporal dithering is ON by default so even if your panel is up to snuff the graphics card forces dithering of that even makes sense.
NVIDIA supposedly does not have temporal dithering ON by default so likely no issues there. Thing is xbox and ps4 use Radeon chips so people suspect dithering to be on. Anyway to test if it is?
Maybe you could get one of those HDMI cables that actively smooth out the image? This may help, although they cost $150 or so.
A way to test it would be to look very closely at the screen and see if you can see pixel flickering. Or do some high speed recordings of the picture and look for it, like @wendell does with his monitor testing. If you cannot detect anything, you should be ok. If your eyes hurt, lower the contrast, take breaks, get some glasses, all the things we are meant to do.
I can think of a couple different ways to test this, but neither one is very cheap. If you want to test PS4/XBone specifically, you could use a capture card and examine the frames individually, or you could use a high-speed camera and record the the TV. Again, you’d need to examine the frames individually.
I rather doubt that the consoles (or GPUs themselves) have this enabled because it would show up in screenshots and I would imagine that some reviewers would have caught it, especially when doing any sort of image quality comparison.
As a bit of anecdotal evidence, I can detect temporal dithering on my monitor when I see it and I have a PS4 and an RX480. I have never noticed temporal dithering when using either, but maybe it is used sparing and I didn’t notice it?
Interesting what kind of cable are we talking about here and how would it help in terms of temporal dithering? Would it disable it?
What sort of camera do you need specifically to capture it? Would you know?
Thanks for that info. What kind of monitor do you have? Is it true 8bit? What kind of camera are we talking?
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This one. It will not disable dithering, if it is present. It will just blur it out with aliasing.
I am no camera expert. Try your phone camera on super slo-mo mode. If you cannot see anything, check the monitor testitng videos for what they use. A capture card might work well if it is able to capture lossless video, should be a bit cheaper than a camera also.
My monitor is 8 bit.
You’re looking for a camera that can record triple your refresh rate at least, just to be sure that you’re catching every frame.
Wait but if your monitor is true 8bit when do you ever run into a situation where dithering would be used? The times you do notice. And would you say that is temporal dithering you notice? Most things are encoded at 8bit right movies console games anime etc? Unless your watching hdr content?
Triple my refresh rate so a camera that can record at 180hz atleast? Like in slow mo? Sorry if I sound ignorant cause I am lol.
Thanks for that link. Hmm I wonder if it’s enough to mitigate it.
How expensive are these cameras lol?
… I have used worse monitors and TVs (have a couple crappy laptops etc). I used to bring my PS4 to my friend’s place for LANs occasionally, but that was a while ago.
A proper high speed camera is expensive, but I admit I have never bought one.
Okay cool so on your true 8bit monitor you’ve never noticed dithering cool. Mind sharing which monitor it is I’m in the market.
Guys maybe I’m jus being a overly cautious hypochondriac it’s just i came across this website I don’t know if it’s quackery or what but he was talking about how flicker is bad for your health and causes this and that and amongst it he was mentioning dithering. I mean some people do claim dithering causes eyestrain so not sure if to truly is problematic or not. Anyway here’s the site http://www.conradbiologic.com/articles/SubliminalFlickerI.html
Getting out of bed in the morning is bad for your health. So is staying in bed all day I guess.
I would test it out before dropping cash on stuff. Give it a test run. If you notice blodshot eyes, eyestrain, migranes, start eliminating things. Try a different tv. Go to a tv showroom and try out their TVs, see if you can reproduce the issue.
It won’t outright make you drop dead, just make you somehat uncomfortable.
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Yea thats sound advice thanks. It would just help if I can confirm and eliminate the issue I guess you know what i mean.
Temporal dithering (TD) could (read: potentially) cause seizures in a seizure prone individual in select, rare circumstances. My sister has downs syndrome and I’ve been around a lot of people with various issues, including one lad who, among other things, was seizure prone. His parents had to closely monitor his access to computers and TV (though I don’t know if dithering was directly related, I’m just assuming since TD is a flashing light and flashing lights are dangerous to seizure-prone individuals). For most people, it should just cause slight eye-strain or a mild headache if endured for too long.
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Sorry to hear about your sis. Yea if someone is seizure prone TD would probably be least of their concerns as there are more obvious sources of flashes when watching any sort of TV.
Also from what I understand TD presents itself like a light snow like noise. Not really a flash or flicker. It’s very subtly from what I was told by a expert it is the switching of 2 shades of the same color.
Thanks for such a vast flow of information. My sister was diagnosed with ADHD earlier. But recently through an article I came to know that a game owner has claimed that ADHD can be treated by playing video games. The docs say that playing video games can increase concentration and learning power. So, my dad bought a PS4 with [] plan. But this PS4 is flickering black for a moment and then it restores to the state where it was. I called the technician who said, flickering maybe because of the HDMI control feature and hence he changed the HDMI control to off mode. Now the flickering has stopped.