I disabled dithering on Apple silicon + Introducing Stillcolor macOS M1/M2/M3

aiaf I'm starting to suspect that my MBP 16" Max display is true 10-bit.

Could you please enter the command

ioreg -l | grep IODisplayEDID

to try to get the EDID value. Probably, getting this information, we will know what is display on your laptop.

aiaf Should I send it to you in a private message with the pastebin link?

aiaf manufacturer and bitdepth exists in IORegistryExplore. Not sure if they can be changed tho. They're mostly in nested structures. Mine was at 8 for the built in display. If I remember correctly I could change it below 8 as well with EDID for an external display

aiaf nice example. I turned off dark mode in MBA M3, and its a bit better to my eyes. I don't know why, but gray/black colors giving eye strain more than light colors. If i'm opening VS code with dark theme its causing some eye strain and slight nausea.

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

no it's a big difference

macOS scale down
Windows scale up

try to disable "retina" mode in macOS and tell me if the text is more gentle and easier to read despite being super blurry

madmozg I think MBP is using 10bit display, without FRC

On my MacBook Pro I do see a change with Stillcolor in that it seems to reveal quantization artifacts. Waves of magenta and cyan. Seems they have kept some level of dithering in place to further boost the display beyond 10 bits and manage those waves. It still isn’t clear if this is temporal or spatial dithering.

Thanks for those screenshots. It really seems to follow that “support for X colors” is Apple’s marketing for FRC dithering.

Blooey I also saw it with MBP 14', dont know why. Looks like software tried to send 8bit signal, but GPU of apple silicon still using dithering or something like that.

"Support billion of colors" words used by some manufacturers like LG SAMSUNG ASUS and etc. You can check their websites and official specifications. In monitors manuals they will show you what type of display, 8bit, 8bit+FRC or true 10 bit, its easy, but I think not that easy with Apple. I wonder if this specification type forced to have by US regulators or so? And why apple don't have this kind of described documentation what kind of display etc used in their devices..

For example asus specifications for their monitors:

madmozg This is just a commercial trick

Apple claims about 1 billion fake color achieved by temporal dithering but they never say these are the "fake colors".

Lot's of references to pixelcapture in the flags. Wouldn't capturing image directly from the framebuffer be enought to diff for dithering, if laptop screens are mostly dumb? I saw some old references to capturing pixel data on Google, but no idea how hard it would be to actually make a working solution here.

Somewhat on the side, but if you could capture pixel data properly it would be fairly easy to do some logic that gives a score to how much changes there are to the screen. You could even calculate in a way where it would ignore things if the same image is shifted slightly in one direction for the next frame, so it gets a high score if you drag or scroll with choppy movement. There are massive differences in how choppy things are in browsers as well, based on mouse used, how the drivers interact with the browser, if smooth scrolling behaves well with it, if something is locking the ProMotion VRR among other things.

I have a Lumix S5ii and this camera able to do 30 shots per second. Maybe I can somehow capture dithering on MBA? Like setting proper shutter speed. And after using ffmpeg to make a video and see any differences/pixel flickering. I don't have any micro lenses unfortunately, to make a really close photos to display

Did anyone experiment with the logging flags? I couldn't figure out where they end up. Don't thing they are written to disk automatically at least.

Found these as well. Not that ChatGPT descriptions can be trusted, but seemed promising.

enableDBMMode: This flag likely refers to a "Dynamic Backlight Management" mode. Dynamic Backlight Management (DBM) is a technology used to adjust the backlight intensity of a display based on the content being shown. This can enhance the viewer's experience by improving contrast and detail in dark areas of the image while also reducing power consumption. In a device's framebuffer, enabling DBM mode would allow the system to dynamically adjust backlight levels based on real-time screen content, optimizing for both display quality and energy efficiency.

enableBLMSloper: This flag seems to indicate an option to enable a "Backlight Luminance Modulation Slope" adjustment. This feature would allow the system to control the rate at which backlight luminance changes, possibly in response to changes in environmental lighting conditions or on-screen content. A sloper adjustment could fine-tune the backlight for smoother transitions or more accurate representation of content brightness, enhancing user comfort and potentially contributing to energy savings by avoiding overuse of high backlight levels.