ryans In theory an external display should always be presented as 8-bits to the GPU and drivers and the display would do any needed dithering on it's own, but sadly that isn't the case and many GPU's and GPU driver do dithering even when presented with a 8-bit color depth from the displays EDID.
Your using 8-bit, you'd have to enable 10-bit manually, and many applications don't support it.
Came across this for possibly disabling dithering in Linux: http://philtechnicalblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/temporal-dithering-good-for-colour.html
ryans It's been covered here before, but the settings for dithering in nvidia-settings looks like this
(And no it does nothing for bad 9xx or 10xx cards)
ryans The hack the Amulet Hotkey made, is that to disable OS X dithering? My understanding is OS X does dithering constantly.
Yes and yes.
They only give the hack out with their $600 video capture boxes though.
I'm not going to say much but I have been doing research on how to do similar for the past 6 months 
Email me sometime and I'll give you a TL:DR since I'm not done yet.
JTL I see, this gets confusing because there can be multiple things that dither, including OS X, Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Intel Graphics, and other GPUs.
I don't see a reason why dithering is enabled on OS X with no user option to turn it off? There's no reason to dither if the display is 8-bit.
I looked at the Amulet Hotkey PDF. If someone was able to obtain the .dmg, I think that'd disable dithering and we wouldn't have to use their video capture boxes.
A few years ago I filed a bug report with Apple Accessibility about an unrelated issue with an API call and it eventually got fixed. Maybe we can petition Apple to make dithering user customizable on OS X and iOS.
Does anyone know if Ubuntu does temporal dithering?
ryans I looked at the Amulet Hotkey PDF. If someone was able to obtain the .dmg, I think that'd disable dithering and we wouldn't have to use their video capture boxes.
I presume it checks for the box first. That being said, there are zero downloads of the .dmg that are public.
ryans A few years ago I filed a bug report with Apple Accessibility about an unrelated issue with an API call and it eventually got fixed. Maybe we can petition Apple to make dithering user customizable on OS X and iOS.
How complex was the bug?
ryans Does anyone know if Ubuntu does temporal dithering?
It depends if the graphics driver itself dithers.
JTL How complex was the bug?
Not super complex, I'm not OS Kernel developer, but I think it was at most a month's worth of engineering time.
JTL t depends if the graphics driver itself dithers.
Sure, but our understanding is OS X will dither no matter if Intel, Nvidia, etc graphics driver, because the code that does dithering is in the OS X Kernel and not graphics driver code?
Kray Here's a picture taken with a Canon 80D of a BenQ GW2760HS connected to a desktop with a Quadro K4000 with dithering disabled.
https://i.imgur.com/DjlwGdg.jpg
Even though it's a compressed image meaning lower quality, try zooming in and out. You can see a similar pattern on a static image.
JTL I emailed someone from a mailing list (he's a CS professor, so I assume he's pretty technical) about Intel graphics. This is his response:
What happened is that over time (say, maybe three months), my eyes stopped noticing the temporal dithering. I can sort of notice it if I pay close attention, but it doesn't cause me any more eyestrain. I was really surprised that this happened, and very grateful! This is in sharp contrast to (say) PWM flickering, which you never get used to. The other thing that can be done is to switch to Linux, because the Linux Intel drivers turn off temporal dithering (actually, you can configure it whichever way you want). Right now I'm using Mac computers (a laptop and a Mac Pro), both of which use temporal dithering. I also use F.Lux to cut down on the blue light, but that's a separate issue.
So he claims:
1. Linux drivers turn off temporal dithering? Really? Or it's a configuration, which maybe explains why some sufferers are okay and others are not?
2. Maybe I should ask intel-gfx (mailing list about intel drivers) about it?
3. I wonder what dithering is like on a virtual machine? Let's say I disable dithering on Linux and run Ubuntu in VMWare or VirtualBox. If that Windows 10 Anniversary Build nonsense is fixed, perhaps Windows would be usable. IIRC the vm would not use Intel graphics drivers.
ryans 1. Linux drivers turn off temporal dithering? Really? Or it's a configuration, which maybe explains why some sufferers are okay and others are not?
It depends on the driver.
ryans 2. Maybe I should ask intel-gfx (mailing list about intel drivers) about it?
Good luck
ryans 3. I wonder what dithering is like on a virtual machine? Let's say I disable dithering on Linux and run Ubuntu in VMWare or VirtualBox. If that Windows 10 Anniversary Build nonsense is fixed, perhaps Windows would be usable. IIRC the vm would not use Intel graphics drivers.
Unless your using PCIe passthrough to pass through a "real" GPU into the virtual machine it would just use the emulated GPU hardware you configure in the virtual machine settings. Here's OS X running under a KVM hypervisor with a generic VESA graphics adapter, the image looks steady
https://cdn.jtl.pw/osxvm/ (feel free to download and zoom into the individual pixels if you'd like)
there is some source of dithering that looks almost identical to temporal dithering, but it is triggered my movement on the screen, such as mouse movement. I can see on youtube videos of windows, mac, and Linux that it is in all three OS. Anyone know what that would be called? the temporal dithering is halted by
xrandr --output HDMI1 --set "Dither" "off"
but the dithering pattern is still there statically. the mouse movement makes the pattern dither always down and to the right. on all 3 OS. It has to be an OS thing because
xrandr --output HDMI1 --set "Dither" "on" causes the identical pattern on the whole screen all the time.
ShivaWind Looking at that YouTube video has me confused. Only the GPU should be doing dithering, not any OS kernel. Those e-ink displays attach via USB so should bypass any Intel graphics. Right?
I spoke to someone to developed the AMD Amulet Kext and Android Developers at Google and they both say they do not think the operating system kernel does any dithering at all (and this makes sense). The GPU does.
