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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

pl01

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.

madmozg

@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?

async

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.

waydabber

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.

async

waydabber Awesome explanation. Any way to reliably disable it, to see if it brings any improvements? I guess I could delete the daemon entirely, but I have a feeling I'll be in safe mode scrambling to fix stuff pretty fast. Can't remember seeing this intense flickering of the entire screen before, but it was super visible on Instagram.

async

If I kill it continously with this command I don't get the flicker. However it does generate console messages about the services and apps using it that was restarted, and causes a short freeze upon restarting after a while.

Not sure what this means, but I found it somewhat interesting.

while true; do ps aux | grep corebrightnessd; pgrep corebrightnessd | xargs kill -9; sleep 1; done

async

Sentiny Stumbled upon something relevant to enabling different options changing the rendering. AXVisualSupportAgent has been noted by others to use a lot of ram, and it shuts down when you disable all the relevant options. As you can see below it even has system calls to the brightness daemon.

sudo fs_usage | grep AXVisualSupportAgent

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