So do you notice any strain at all even after this or is your Mac completely comfortable now?
I disabled dithering on Apple silicon + Introducing Stillcolor macOS M1/M2/M3
This is the most epic post. Thank you for your hard work! You should set up a way for people to buy you a virtual pint if it helped them
WOW thankyou so much… I don't have immediate access to an M1/M2/M3 but Ill grab one asap to try this!!!! deeply hopefully and grateful!!
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This is wonderful news for Mac users. Windows and Linux users would need a similar solution. I am wondering how your results would look under microscope and high speed camera or professional oscilloscope and photodetector.
Sunspark don't have my computer here, but this can be done by tinkering with exporting and importing the display edid in betterdisplay and editing it in AW EDID editor. Forced mine to 8 bit, that can be confirmed by the billions of colors option being gone or checking some high gamut test image. There or lots of advanced options like timings that can be tweaked. The problem is usually having reliable measures for when it is actually better.
This also influences things with how mac os treats the display. I have one usb-c port that doesn't even work with my display after tinkering with edids, even tho they are stored on the monitor. As far as I understand when connecting a new display there is quite a bit of negotiation and best guess things done by the os based on the edid and initial tests, so in theory it would be possible to have a display that is utter trash on a specific port. Might also be cases where first using a display with a bad cable could force it to YCbCr 4:2:2. There is also a plethora of different video transfer compression methods with display port that I looked into at some point. There's some info about this on Wikipedia if anyone wants to deep dive.
Digging into all this is time consuming, but can be done by wiping out plists and diffing AllRez output.
aiaf Thank you very much, this is absolutely fantastic work. I will be testing this solution so will not share any feedback yet to avoid any placebo effect. Also I have developed macbook phobia after anxiety attacks caused by it, so will need to test step by step. So far can only confirm on Macbook air m2 13 inch command - "ioreg -lw0 | grep -i enableDither" does indicate app is turning it off successfully. Also, your videos with differing on and off now kind of make sense to me, as I was a bit confused whether there is something wrong with my health when I thought even VNC remote login felt weird.
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This is incredible. I genuinely thought that this wasn’t possible.
I’m actually in the process of selling my Apple stuff and moving on completely to Windows/Android where I would have more granular control over display characteristics but this is making me reconsider, at least for the MacOS/Windows part of it anyway. For some of my computing needs MacBooks really have no equal and that doesn’t look like it will change in the short to mid-term.
I’m looking forward to reading reports from other people trying this app!
twomee give your eyes some rest, at least 12 hours without looking at LEDs. The muscles are strained and need to recover. Does your external screen have PWM? I'm not a professional- I literally did not know what temporal dithering was a month ago.
jordan unfortunately I don't use Windows nor is it or driver programming my forte, but I'm sure there are enterprising individuals out there that can help. It shouldn't be hard as long as it's possible.
Sunspark are you asking whether changing the color profile on macOS turns off dithering? Nothing turns off dithering (in my experience so far) except setting enableDither to false on the driver. I do find more comfort with an sRGB profile rather than P3, but I need to do more testing. What is IT Content? I believe banding is dependent on a few things, and correct me if I'm wrong, but display quality, color profile, color depth and dithering are all simultaneous factors.
sakraycore an iOS app should be possible, although there will additional hurdles with distribution and testing. The IOKit entitlements will prevent such an app from getting into the App Store, probably would need to jailbreak your iPhone to sideload the app, or move to Europe.
jordan it's a night and day difference. I will never vouch for the M3 Max MBP built-in display because it does exhibit PWM, but using a flicker-free external monitor is fine now. Adjusting blue light and color profile are additional measures that I also take.
photon78s Do you have any recommendations such tools? Could help testing whether different types of cables affect the image.
async have you seen the new Elgato 4K X capture card it advertises 4K@144Hz passthrough and a built-in EDID editor
Donux does your 13" M2 MBA have PWM?
ryans banding is subtle. For most purpose, it's actually surprising that there is no degradation in image quality. If you have to do serious graphics/video editing and need perfect colors you can turn temporal dithering back on temporarily.
aiaf are you asking whether changing the color profile on macOS turns off dithering? Nothing turns off dithering (in my experience so far) except setting enableDither to false on the driver. I do find more comfort with an sRGB profile rather than P3, but I need to do more testing. What is IT Content? I believe banding is dependent on a few things, and correct me if I'm wrong, but display quality, color profile, color depth and dithering are all simultaneous factors.
No, I am talking about the colour space not the colour profile. They're not the same thing.. I'm talking about chroma, etc. here. The reason I mention it is because code is written to handle a colour space and process it, and using a different rendering path renders different results. In terms of quality, 4:4:4 chroma for YCbCr will be the same as RGB.
IT Content is "This is a HDMI feature which supports from HDMI1.4 onwards, so this feature is applicable only for HDMI displays. HDMI1.4 spec will give more details about this feature. The Content Type feature enables a display to auto-select the correct viewing mode to match the content type it is currently receiving from a source device, and to switch modes when a new content source is selected. Content type support content profiles for gaming, movie, photos and text viewing modes."
So you can see why I have it off on mine.
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Hope it's not just a placebo, but now I can even use Colour LCD profile on my Macbook Air m2, however sRGB profile still feels better. Text feels much more stable when I read and I finally see this lovely grey color banding 
. I will keep testing your app.
Thanks a lot for your great work! It's huge!
I've tested this app for one day on my MBA M2 15 and can confirm that it works for me. Now I have zero eye strain. My eyes are so sensitive for PWM and Temporal Dithering so I can easily judge is there any on a display. I can assure you this app does its job related to dithering.
If you guys have M1-M3 mini-led Macbook pros, I am sure PWM is you problem.
@aiaf I think you need to add donation section in your app.
aiaf nope, never tested a capture card. But I did try to dig pretty deeply in this, but don't really have any background in mac development. Dissassembled a bunch of stuff and got the cache unpacked before I called it quits the last time. But for EDID editing you don't actually need any hardware device to manipulate it. It's not available for the built in screen tho.
Sentiny same here. All these options are a nightmare on both Mac and iOS. But not changing cursor color in my experience. I figured it might be somewhat like eye training to have a bright red cursor some months ago and has been using that ever since. Sure beats spending time one some dedicated trading where you try to follow some red dot 