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

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs unfortunately metal color adjustments aren't compatible with all apps, Blender and Ableton Live for example remain super bright and probably prevent direct display mode from taking effect whenever they're open

wait… really weird difference between M1 Air and M2 TB Pro spotted.

on M2 TB Pro, this is true, Blender/Ableton/3D games will "bypass" the metal overlay and show at max brightness "within their window" instead

on M1 Air, this is NOT true, all these apps WILL be affected by the overlay and get dimmer. they only bypass the overlay if they are put in full screen.

however, macOS Mission Control bypasses overlay and shows really bright on both laptops

strange…

i wonder if M2 TB Pro has some sort of additional "HDR" feature that the M1 Air doesn't?

according to Apple docs both M1 Air and M2 TB Pro support "emulated HDR" on the internal display. but maybe the implementation on the M2 TB Pro is different?

both have same OS, same color settings, and same BetterDisplay version and settings

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs I messed around a lot with color profiles and gain recently. Somehow never tried super low gain earlier.

One thing that is really visible is if you have a custom color profile where for example light grays are more red and dark grays are more blue is that with metal brightness you would shift the color of the entire screen, while with regular brightness the colors would stay the same. Gain also does pretty funky things then. So I would guess that you can cut off the top of the high gamut colors for example. If you didn't already I would urge you to try the display calibratior app as well and watch text on the screen when you try some of the more extreme adjustments. I had no idea how much it could change how different a screen feels. I managed to get an almost dark screen when text was clearly readable. You can create color profiles that are more red when you use them with low light or similar things that better reflects how light behaves.

This is my currently active ioreg flags btw. Most doesn't do anything obvious, but at least these doesn't crash anything. Might be some that also makes my screen more tolerable. It's pretty nice now, but I don't have any reliable way to measure flicker.

"enableDither": false,
"uniformity2D": false,
"VUCEnable": false,
"BLMPowergateEnable": false,
"enableDarkEnhancer": false,
"enableDBMMode": false,
"enableBLMSloper": false,
"IOMFBBrightnessCompensationEnable": false,
"IOMFBTemperatureCompensationEnable": false,
"IOMFBContrastEnhancerStrength": NSNumber(0),
"enable2DTemperatureCorrection": false,
"DisableTempComp": true,
"PCCEnable": true,
"PCC2DEnable": true,
"PCCCabalEnable": true,
"SystemConsoleMode": true,
"APTDefaultGrayValue": NSNumber(10),
"APTEnableCA" : false,
"APTEnableConfigExpired" : true,
"APTEnableDefaultGray" : false,
"APTEnableEvents" : true,
"APTEnableLogs" : true,
"APTEnablePRC" : false,
"APTFixedRR" : NSNumber(0),
"APTLimitRefreshRate" : false,
"APTPDCEnable" : false,
"APTPDCEnablePM" : NSNumber(0),
"AODFixedRR": NSNumber(0),
"PCC2DLedAccelLog": NSNumber(value: 0),
"PCCEnableLogs": false,
"BLMAHOutputLogEnable": false,
"BLMAHStatsLogEnable": false,
"BLMAHMode": NSNumber(1),

async I messed around a lot with color profiles and gain recently. Somehow never tried super low gain earlier.

it seems like it's specifically Metal mode that is making some kind of significant difference, most likely due to Metal Direct Display mode.

disabling all color table adjustments, enabling Metal adjustments instead and using the same settings to get a "visually identical" image to what i was getting before with color table made BOTH Macs significantly more comfortable.

(although flicker on camera is still visible on M1 Air. but M1 Air flicker doesn't seem to bother me THAT much though)

it feels like text glows less than the seemingly equivalent settings in color table mode

i wonder if color table mode is messing with the TCON in some way and introducing some kind of additional flicker (even though banding still appears in color table mode if Stillcolor is activated)

the weirdest thing is even using a pretty high gain seems to immediately improve comfort as long as i'm in Metal color adjustments mode and using some kind of color adjustment at all, even a small one.

it's like specifically a Metal overlay going fullscreen that suddenly changes the appearance of the screen, not necessarily what color it's changing it to.

async not sure if it's placebo but specifically changing this property seems to improve M1 Air for me

/Applications/BetterDisplay.app/Contents/MacOS/BetterDisplay set -namelike=built -framebufferNumericProperty=0x0 -specifier=overdriveCompCutoff

Sets response time overdrive compensation to 0, because it's not 0 by default on M1 Air.

For some reason after I do this, then enter and exit sleep mode, I swear the screen feels better from then on.

Doesn't affect flicker on camera at all, still there at same intensity.

On M2 TB Pro it's 0 by default.

async color tables enabled significant banding and dithering in a large area the cursor

true, but only happens on mini-LED.

there, color tables definitely mess with things way more, as they will also affect local dimming, whatever the heck the TCON is doing with hardware-level color management and reference modes, etc.

can't really compare mini-LED Mac behavior to LCD Macs most of the time, as they have a very different display architecture

according to stillcolor source code:

M2 MacBook Air and M2 Mac mini use AppleCLCD2
While an M3 Max MBP for example uses IOMobileFramebufferShim

@async SO much less strain with Metal color adjustments! i don't even think it's coming from the color adjustment itself, it's coming from the a switch to Metal overlay

because i don't even have the gain turned down that much or anything. only at -20% gain. but something feels really different about the screen, a lot more stable.

i don't even need any changes in colors or anything at all, just turn gain down slightly and that's it, huge difference.

pretty sure of my theory that Metal Direct Display Mode is active and is bypassing the GPU's own color table LUT management, potentially altering or removing some other steps in the GPU to display pipeline too

mapped these commands to Touch Bar buttons to control gain:

/Applications/BetterDisplay.app/Contents/MacOS/BetterDisplay set --gain=-5% -offset

/Applications/BetterDisplay.app/Contents/MacOS/BetterDisplay set --gain=5% -offset

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs i wonder if M2 TB Pro has some sort of additional "HDR" feature that the M1 Air doesn't?

yep it's definitely HDR related, when opening the GPU accelerated app that gets super bright all the other windows noticeably change color for a second and then fade back

also, whenever these bright apps are open, the strain returns (even when moving the window mostly offscreen and looking at a dim window)

which probably is directly tied to Metal Direct Display mode getting disabled again due to the overlay not being able to apply across the whole screen

hiding the bright app, the strain goes away again

is it possible to disable HDR on M2 TB Pro? I remember on Intel Macs you can option click Displays in preferences to turn off HDR for the internal display, but that's not working here

Low Power Mode doesn't disable it

Edit: figured out a hacky way to get around it, change Accessibility Zoom to "picture-in-picture", click Size and Location to make it as small as possible on the bottom right, "Keep zoom window stationary" in advanced settings, then activate zoom.

HDR stuff across the whole screen will disable (except for a very slight backlight change if your hardware backlight level is below 100%) whenever zoom is active.

async Does it have locked brightness for color profiles?

No this is only a mini-LED thing. The LCD Macs don't have the "reference modes" feature at ALL and instead feature the old school color profiles menu.

Anyway I figured out a kinda hacky workaround to disable HDR, see above

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

I tried this and didn't see anything change probably because the panel had so little pixel flicker to being with.

photon78s interesting, because just using the metal color adjustment at all (as in specifically in Metal mode, NOT the default Color Table mode) is making a HUGE difference for me —

so much easier to focus in on something my M2 TB Pro without sometimes feeling a sharp pain which is sometimes what happened before. after applying the metal color adjustment, that strain immediately decreased so much

doing an equal color adjustment in Color Table mode, it would look like text is glowing or the screen still feels "too bright" even though it's darker, like oversaturated no matter how much i reduce dimming or contrast.

but in Metal mode, it actually feels like the screen gets truly dimmer, less glare, less glow

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

So when viewing blooey's gradient chart, I see larger bands above 8-bit level with your recommended settings using Metal than without when dimming through image adjustments in BetterDisplay.

Here is my panel serial for MBP 13 M2 TB:

FMX352507ZHNTJJAQ+GE1S3B02830546+PROD+Y342234423453+12352321352423352412352420+K72430781K80331107+645052230KP8C500TTCYYGAHDC2638520+S47U894Z82S47U894Z82S47U894Z82S47U894Z

With this new MBP 13 M2 TB I noticed in the evening when I don't have any good lightning in my room I'm getting heavy eye strain. Like nausea and headaches. Don't know why, with previous model I don't think that I've noticed something similar to this one, this one definitely hits harder.

I was just sitting in the dark room with the laptop, and damn, I got hit hard with nausea jeez, didn't feel that bad for a very long time maybe since I tested new iphones…