new-jdm It doesn't work in my case. I have true 8bit display and connected with display port, FRC is still used somehow, and If i'm using HDMI I can see bandings on gray color, which means 8bit signal. But still even with 8bit signal on external display i'm having bad times, getting nausea and eye strain and only with Apple M chips.
I disabled dithering on Apple silicon + Introducing Stillcolor macOS M1/M2/M3
- Edited
Rikl I just told about few examples. In my opinion any OS setting which interacts with GPU somehow influence on display rendering. You can try to enable/disable any settings in display accessibility menu or trackpad scroll/zoom area and compare text rendering. You will be surprised. Even “tap to click” option makes a difference 
I guess that trackpad zoom settings, such as smart zoom, make OS to do “zoom previews” which needs more GPU utilization, that’s why display rendering is changing. It’s just a theory, but I can feel difference.
You can try to disable smooth scrolling in Safari and will see the same thing (text will be clearer to read).
But if you try to disable 60 fps cap in Safari, you will get opposite result.
Difference is not huge compare to dithering on/off, but it’s there.
For me MacOS is not that stable compare to Windows, if we talk about eyestrain issues.
Sentiny I also noticed that changing any setting related to GPU (especially not default MacOS settings) , such as Reduced Motion, Reduced Transparency, Display Contrast or even enabling/disabling "Scroll & Zoom" settings in trackpad options (smart zoom, rotation, zoom in or out) somehow influence on text clarity and eye fatigue for me.
Had the same feel. I mostly credited it to breaking habitation in the brain. It can also work the other way around where doing some more significant changes forces something to actually do it's job with filtering. For example having reflections or shining a light on the screen makes it better for me, as the brain has no other option than filtering out things.
But, seeing this I'm not sure anymore. I found that certain things can cause software rendering of the cursor, that causes dithering in a rather large area around it. For example using color tables.
I've always felt that tweaking will just make everything glow again, but as I said earlier in the thread it is hard to know if it is neurological or if it is the panel, as it is transient. What if changing things clears some cache or that some already checked value used for dithering adjustments doesn't get updated, or even causes some timing mismatch. In which case it should at least disappear after powering down the machine (and gpu), and giving it a few min to cache, heat up or whatever.
It would be interested if someone could measure before and after some of these changes, or even diff the ioreg. Or just try to induce it and see if recoding works without changing everything back.
I'm wondering does touching the bare metal aluminum case of these laptops like when you are typing induce a ground loop type hum you can hear through wired headphone when you have the headphones connected to the audio jack of the laptop? I've experienced this with metal cased PC laptops.
DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs I just checked notebookcheck for this MacBook Pro 13 M2 with Touch Bar, and they say that PWM with 117kHz only appears if you go below 56% of brightness, which should be totally fine for me! I've just ordered refurbished one for testing, should arrive this Wed. So I will have 2 laptops for testing and decision which one to keep MBA 15 M2 and refurbished MBP 13 M2.
- Edited
photon78s if you have MBP, I had same issues with cracking sounds and as far as I remember it’s known issue (not sure if they fixed it in m3).
I always use cables with grounding pin for my charger, to prevent static feel on a Macbook case.
As Async said, just check sound issues while you are on battery.
Sentiny I also noticed that changing any setting related to GPU (especially not default MacOS settings) , such as Reduced Motion, Reduced Transparency, Display Contrast or even enabling/disabling "Scroll & Zoom" settings in trackpad options (smart zoom, rotation, zoom in or out) somehow influence on text clarity and eye fatigue for me. So I am use to my current settings and just afraid to change something
I didn't face such problems with Windows, as I remember.
I think you may be onto something here. My full story is here, but basically my symptoms originally started with a Mini-LED 14-inch MacBook Pro (like many others here). Before I got rid of the MacBook, I used the macOS Migration Assistant to move my data back to my "safe" Mac Pro, and while this helped I was still having strain after heavy use. I later did a binary clone of my boot drive to yet another machine (a 2015 Retina MacBook Pro), and noticed that the strain was still there. I thought my condition had simply gotten worse, but then I happened to boot from a different drive with a clean macOS Monterey installation, and noticed that it looked calmer. So now I am wondering about strain-causing settings/configurations that possibly came over when I migrated/cloned my data between devices.
- Edited
aiaf Thanks a lot for the new release. I tried uniformity2D on a Dell u2711 ( 8bit + FRC, but CCFL ) and it feels way better than before. I am surprised myself!
For a week now or so I used a Windows PC with an Nvidia 4060 GPU and dithering turned off which felt already pretty good but with uniformity2d turned off it seems to be the best experience I had in years.
But let's wait a bit more
Sentiny I could enable it and it made a difference for me. However "something happened" an I am back to Windows. Seems there is still something on OSX that is weird for my eyes. StillColor makes it however a lot better.
Continuation of my observations:
Got EVanlak 8K dummy hdmi plug. Set up the mirroring of it to external display connected to macbook pro 14 m1 pro via DP cable.
This dongle does not corrupt it's edid info (which is over 256 bytes for some reason). Also it has built in support for 120 hz mode and 1440p out of the box.
So it's basically plug and play setup for now.
I do see color banding like the true 8-bit mode without dithering
Whenever I connect it to Windows PC YCbCr 4:4:0 or 4:2:0 is shown in the connection details.
I have a suspicion that using YCbCr dummy and rgb output for external monitor forces 8-bit color internally.
Also tried flashing EDID with YCbCr signals completely removed from EDID. This way mirroring of RGB color space of dummy to RGB color space of external monitor did not help - I've got the same headaches as plugging to it using DP (without dummy mirroring).
Maybe the MacOS's dithering can also be disabled using YCbCr/RGB color space manipulations?
Connecting the monitor (AOC Q27G2S/EU 1440p 165 HZ 8-bit+FRC) using HDMI forces the color space to YCbCr with colors that look off (too darkened). However, the color banding is here the same as with YCbCr to RGB conversion.
Connecting the monitor using HDMI with modified EDID which has all the blocks related to YCbCr support removed results in the same picture 1 to 1 as when connecting using DP 1.4 cable (almost no banding seen) and immediate headaches.
Color reproduction seems the same when mirroring YCbCr hdmi dummy to RGB external display.
@DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs do you know why with StillColor enabled I see this on MBP M2 with touch bar?
ioreg -lw0 | grep -i enableDither
| | | | | "enableDither" = Yes
| | | | "enableDither" = No
| | | | "enableDither" = No
Do you know why first is Yes? Is it because touch bar is active?
Does anyone else get flickering of the entire display when some hdr video starts playing on M1 Max? It happens while browising Instagram, and it seems like there is some bug there. Flickers intensely for 1-3 sec. Happens when that window is in the background as well. Tried reverting to regular XDR profile and color profile, as well as disable BetterDisplay entirely. AppleAVD that processes video is involved.
Not exactly sure what it does, but this could be related to the percieved variation in the XDR display.
- Edited
async When you start a HDR video, the screen switches to EDR mode which has a ramp-up time. During this time the available EDR headroom (the extra brightness beyond the SDR peak brightness) changes multiple times. When this happens the system dispatches out multiple system notifications to subscribing running apps asking them to re-tone-map their HDR content to match the changed luminance range. Some apps like Safari, Photos etc that can have HDR content on screen might redraw things as a consequence. This might cause flickering (normally it shouldn't though) + somewhat slow down the system temporarily.