Synchronization failure Windows

Hardware
1

Hi everyone, pleasure to meet you! I am a PhD student in Neuroscience at the university of Turin and I have recently started using Psychtoolbox for a visual stimulation paradigm while recording facial EMGs. I started working on MATLAB but I am experiencing some issues concerning Synchronization and timing errors; and this is a problem since for my experiment I need good visual timing precision.
For what I could understand (also from Psychtoolbox website Psychtoolbox-3 - System Requirements) my computer is not functionally good enough based on its technical features, so I decided to look for a new portable PC more suitable. Since I am kind of new about all this environment and I am still just a beginner I was wondering if you had some suggestions about some good computer that I can buy.
I hope I was clear while explaining and thank you in advance!

I am leaving you an example of MATLAB warning errors right below.

! PTB - ERROR: SYNCHRONIZATION FAILURE ! —
One or more internal checks (see Warnings above) indicate that synchronization
of Psychtoolbox to the vertical retrace (VBL) is not working on your setup.

This will seriously impair proper stimulus presentation and stimulus presentation timing!
Please read ‘help SyncTrouble’ for information about how to solve or work-around the problem.
You can force Psychtoolbox to continue, despite the severe problems, by adding the command
Screen(‘Preference’, ‘SkipSyncTests’, 1); at the top of your script, if you really know what you are doing.

2

See all the advice to similar questions on this forum. But the problem is in general not the computer, but the operating system and graphics drivers.

As our system requirements state, for most reliable timing and various other superior things, our advice would be to upgrade to Linux, e.g., install Ubuntu Linux 22.04-LTS as a dual-boot. If the machine has Intel or AMD graphics, then that should solve any known visual timing problem. NVidia is not recommended, but if that’s what you got already, should still work better than on other operating systems.

If you absolutely must stick to MS-Windows then rule #1 is to avoid Intel graphics chips, they are essentially unfixably broken timing-wise on MS-Windows atm. Prefer AMD over NVidia, so can get an optimal Linux setup if/when/once you realize that is the way to go. Avoid laptops with dual graphics cards. There’s tons of more rules to stick to on Windows for any but the most trivial setups to increase the probability of ok’ish timing.

For any further advice → help PsychPaidSupportAndServices. A paid support membership is what any lab using Psychtoolbox should have anyway.
-mario

3

All right, Thank you for the advice and informations!
-Anna