OSX dithering - Help wanted
Seefree are you implying that you found a way to disable the temporal and spatial dithering in macOS?
Getting very close. I found a way to make it worse, now to make it better
What is a good way to test eyestrain caused by macbook dithering ? Is the recovery mode option still viable with he latest macos and intel integrated gpu?
Unsure
JTL I came across this: https://communities.intel.com/message/535654#535654
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I wonder if a high speed camera (like 1000FPS) that took a video of a laptop or smartphone that caused issues, and we slowed it down, we'd be able to detect dithering or other sources of flicker?
One of the biggest problems we have on here right now is there's no reliable test for anything but PWM (using a smartphone camera, but even that is not 100%)
ryans With regards to PWM, get a high quality oscilloscope and photodiode. Both can be purchased for <$1000. Have a look at @TechSensitive's posts.
With regards to dithering. I want to try a lossless PCIe capture card to check several display outputs in slow motion. Can be purchased for ~$400 at most on eBay.
There's a company in Vancouver that makes a high speed camera that does up to 21,000 fps. It costs $3000 but I know someone who works there and I might be able to test one at their offices.
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@ryans I see your deleted post (since I am a moderator). View my user profile and write me an email and I'll give you a summery of my reverse engineering since not all of it is 100% confirmed yet so I'm not ready to publicly write about it.
Does anyone know wow much it would be (roughly) to get everything needed to use"Amulet Hotkey for KVM over IP"? Has anyone actually tried it to disable themporal dithering?
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It looks like AHK have updated the temporal dithering solutions.
OSX: https://resources.amulethotkey.com/download/AN_057_Temporal_Dithering_on_OSX_v2-7.pdf
Windows: https://resources.amulethotkey.com/download/KBA_144-Disable_temporal_dithering_on_Windows.pdf
I didn't realise there was a solution for Windows (Nvidia) too - they're holding all the cards!
JTL Perhaps the fix works on all driver versions - the guide was produced within the last 6 months so presumably they are using W10+10xx GPU's.
AHK have quite a lot of re-sellers - I tried contacting Jigsaw24 (UK) but didn't get a response. This is mentioned in one of their blogs.
"The usual caveats apply: the fix will only work with Amulet hardware and software, not with that from third parties; the kext itself is not available publicly – in a delightfully cloak-and-dagger scenario, you need to get in touch with our team on the details below, and they'll send you a temporary download link and instructions for how to install it."
It's a long shot but maybe it's worth contacting all AHK re-sellers to see if someone will be sympathetic and provide us with a copy.
We then just need to find a guru to bypass the hardware check and we could have a working solution.
Also worth noting, it's possible connecting your Macbook or Mac computer to an external graphics card (which then connects to an external monitor). The external graphics card might not use temporal dithering at all.
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ryans I can see why you'd think that at first but based on my understanding of how external graphic cards work the drivers are almost the same if not exactly the same .kext as their mobile counterparts, so I highly doubt this is going to solve the issue. People who've owned the Mac Pro which uses a desktop graphics card have still had issues with temporal dithering.
@JTL How does your "no dithering on OSX" project go? Would you care to share any knowledge about this? Maybe in the Wiki?
Seems Amulet Hotkey also changes one settings in the IO registry (different approaches for Nvidia and AMD). Did you ask them to kindly share their findings so that people like us may be able to use Apple products again?
Or maybe we should "spam" Apple support with a request to make dithering optional.
Would be great to have some progress here as I cannot use my MBPs for a long time anymore and I am looking for ways to solve this...