Yes, your hardware is the problem, because against our hardware recommendations, you got yourself an NVidia Optimus laptop. From:
"This device has no display connectivity, as it is not designed to have monitors connected to it. Rather it is intended for use in laptop/notebooks and will use the output of the host mobile device. "
This means that visual timing will be completely and unfixably broken under Windows-10 with your NVidia. Here are your options:
- Disable the NVidia gpu for use with Matlab. I think right-clicking on the Matlab icon -> context menu -> Properties -> will lead you to some checkbox or setting somewhere that allows to use the integrated graphics only for Matlab. Or follow these instructions for selecting “Power saving” instead of “high performance”:
Then you’ll only use Intel integrated graphics, with substantially reduced performance, and either get reasonable visual timing, or if your Intel graphics driver is buggy (which many versions are with many Intel chips on Windows) still broken timing -> Upgrade/Downgrade the Intel driver and hope for the best.
The better solution is to upgrade to Linux, e.g., Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS at this point. Do not ask it to install proprietary drivers if it proposes to do so – during install or at runtime, but use the standard open-source drivers. Intel graphics will be used by default, with reduced performance but usually well working timing. If you needed more performance you could try to utilize the NVidia with the nouveau open-source graphics driver --> “help HybridGraphics”, may need setup with our XOrgConfCreator script. This may or may not give extra performance, depending if your Nvidia gpu is old enough (good!) or recent (bad!).
In general i advise against NVidia gpu’s at this point, unless you have very good reasons to use them. Especially on Linux you won’t be able to take advantage of certain improvements over Windows with modern NVidia gpu’s. We generally also advise against hybrid graphics laptops, because they are mostly broken wrt. visual timing on Windows, and on Linux it depends on the specific hardware configuration if it works very well or not so much. In any case they are less plug & play and more fiddly to set up for visual stimulation.