- Edited
async Interesting. That does sound like a similar noise. It’s a good idea to try an HEIC version of the test image to potentially circumvent the noise at the viewers end. Given they are reporting no noise with HEIC. That said, I’m already encoding the PNG at max quality. And it sounds like I should look more closely at HDR rendering in Metal. If they found Preview can display without the noise, it’s likely a very particular Metal texture backing that is being used by Preview when viewing HEIC’s.
I can sample the noise directly off the screen buffer using Pixie. It seems to be some sort of noise added by Metal, not a compression artifact. I didn’t experiment to see if it is a color dither or just random noise. It shouldn’t be a rounding artifact because it effects each sub-pixel independently.
This does make me wonder if the M2 Air has control over this additional noise at the Metal level, while the Pro does not. Which could be the ultimate difference between the effectiveness of Stillcolor on the Air vs the Pro. Just a thought.