XPS 7590 & Precision 5540: The OLED panel luminance changes based on its display pattern 

Symptom

If you have an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen on your XPS 7590 or Precision 5540 notebook, you may find that the panel luminance changes based on its display pattern.

Some people perceive the symptom as the screen flickering. This can be observed whenever you are playing video games, playing back video content and/or showing a PowerPoint presentation in windowed mode.

Affected systems

(Figure.1 XPS 5790 and Precision 5540)

Solution

This system is working as designed.

To reduce power usage on your notebook, an OLED panel dynamically adjusts the screen luminance based on its On-Pixel Ratio (OPR).

(On-Pixel Ratio represents the ratio of white pixels to the entire image.)

Because the panel can dynamically adjust the luminance, it can make the bright pixels that are displayed more bright by using the saved power from the dark pixels.

(If the ratio of white pixels is larger, then the brightness is lower, if the ratio of white pixels is smaller, then the brightness will be higher.)

This phenomenon is called the loading effect.

(Loading effect increases the peak brightness of the OLED panel with higher contrast.)

To reduce the frequency of the luminance adjustments, we recommended you run your applications in full-screen mode, or to optimize the PowerPoint theme and content, to reduce the OPR significant change.

(Using windowed mode can increase the OPR for faster changes.)

(Figure.2 with and without Loading Effect)