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

Sentiny

Thank you for the new release!

By the way guys, I've tried Uniformity2d=false on MBA m2 15' and still not sure about it. It removes vignetting effect and makes white colors like "true white", but makes my eyes harder to focus, especially when I read text. Need more testing for sure.

What is you experience?

Need to say, that with just Disable Dithering my MBA M2 15 is the only usable Macbook to date.

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.

async

Sentiny This is on MBP mini-led so not exactly the same, but I usually have to tweak a bit in BetterDisplay.

Use 100% resolution so it matches the native one at 2x for retina. At least until things look stable.
Disable colortable adjustments entirely, and enable the ones that use Metal.
Force color profile sRGB in chrome://flags
Open some webpage with a white background and adjust the color adjustments until text seems to be part of the white background, including the color sliders.

For me finding some combo where it seems as flat as possible feels more important than killing off the last flicker. But tbh I don't know any more, as I suddenly feel that my iPhone OLED doesn't strain with reduced white point 100% and 100% green/red color filter that kills off any bright red.

Rikl

Sentiny

I think you have something with the Scroll & Zoom. It's subtle, but seems to make text crisper. Thanks.

I also have the display accessibilty settings all set off.

I agree on uniformity2D too.

Thanks to aiaf for the new release.

async

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.

macsforme

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.

async

aiaf Awesome. Didn't experiment enough with toggling uniformity2D as I just kept it off, but now I see that it actually makes the screen feel flat. At least with window shadows turned off. I can use my MacBook M1 Max for hours now. Still not perfect, but it doesn't get worse and worse while using it.

While experimenting with diffing, did you manage to find a ffmpeg solution or similar to actually gets hdr / 10 bit / fullgamut or whatever recording from the screen? The command line args there are obnoxious, and even after googling and experimenting for an hour I still don't know if it can even do it. Just wanted to experiment a bit with an overlay that shows where HDR colors are currently shown. As that can be used to highlight if for example window shadows or other things are shifting things out of the regular sRGB color space. The regular screencapture tool can't do hdr.

aiaf

async ffmpeg is not my forte to be honest, and I didn't capture HDR on the BMD device. Are you trying to use it to capture your screen? Try asking ChatGPT to create the ffmpeg args for you, it will generally nudge you in the right direction with obviously broken code but you can then refine it by looking at docs and other examples on the web.

deepflame you must've been having a good eye day because uniformity2d is only applicable to the built-in display driver 😄 It's a proprietary Apple thing that affects the backlighting system on the TCON, and Stillcolor only toggles it for the built-in display.

pl01 unfortunately it's extremely challenging to change color bit depth and the default RGB 4:4:4 used on the internal display. For external displays, we can modify EDIDs, windowserver display plist, and use low bandwidth cables.

madmozg are sure you're running Stillcolor (also that it automatically launches on login) and that no other app touched the enableDither property? Try enabling/disabling dithering and check again.

Sentiny

async Now Im more and more sure, that everyone should find their stable MacOS settings and stick with it 🙂

It's a bliss that we got such a breakthrough like Stillcolor app that fix major dithering problems for most of us.

mayhm

Sentiny I have downgraded to Ventura and suddenly my MBA M2 does not feel nauseating to use anymore. Stillcolor also did a heavy lifting change within a matter of day's difference!

Blooey

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.

madmozg

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.

new-jdm

madmozg Interesting, and you're not looking at the built-in display at all?

Right now I am trying to use the external display only and see how I feel.

What I have set up now is to mirror the displays and have the built-in display turned all the way down.

Sentiny

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

async these new apple technologies can turn anybody into a mental patient 🙂 You always need to be sure, is it neurologic or it’s apple’s optimization tricks.

jordan

Sentiny 100%

photon78s

Sentiny

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.

async

photon78s in which case I would try without the power cord plugged in just to be sure

Sentiny

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.

madmozg

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.

deepflame

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

deepflame correct me, but uniformity2d is set to “false” by default for any external monitors? I am not sure you can even enable it. This feature is only for build-in Mac displays.

jordan

deepflame is that dell ccfl monitor better than that eizo one you mentioned on a post years ago?

deepflame

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.

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