Hey. I have the M2 Mac Mini and use a Dell 27" 4K monitor, and I experience no flicker when using an HDMI to HDMI cable. I think this is the one that I bought: Amazon HDMI cable. Hopefully that solves your problems like it did for me
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M1/M2 flickering, ghosting with external display [Merged]
- Thread starter aednichols
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Hey. I have the M2 Mac Mini and use a Dell monitor at home and a Benq at work, and for both of them I experience no flicker when using an HDMI to HDMI cable. I think this is the one that I bought for home: Amazon HDMI cable. Hopefully that solves your problems like it did for me
I never had any flickering with my previous 4K Samsung display too. The only difference between my 4K Samsung display and my Apple Studio Displays is the "wake up" time and the far superior image quality.
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Yea it takes a moment for my Dell monitor to wake up too, but I can live with it. I actually edited out the Benq from my original comment because as I think about it I am not 100% sure it's HDMI on the end thats plugged into the monitor. But regardless of the exact cable it is, my work laptop is an M1 MacBook Pro, and I don't experience flickers with it when its plugged into either my Dell monitor at home or the Benq at work.
As plenty of people have reported numerous times in this and many other threads, using any kind of expensive, cheap, hdmi to hdmi, tb4/tb3 to hdmi/dp etc. whatever type of cable has almost no relation to solving the flickering/image retention issues. For some people it works, for some people it doesn't, for some people it works for a few days/weeks before re-occuring. People have spent 100s of dollars on cables, replacement monitors, plenty of hours on tinkering with mac os settings, plist edits, monitor settings etc. to no avail. At this point it is pretty clear that this is an obscure issue with apple silicon not working well with a variety of non apple external monitors.Hey. I have the M2 Mac Mini and use a Dell 27" 4K monitor, and I experience no flicker when using an HDMI to HDMI cable. I think this is the one that I bought: Amazon HDMI cable. Hopefully that solves your problems like it did for me
It's great that your hdmi to hdmi cable 'seems' to work for you for the moment and I hope it keeps working but there is plenty of evidence in this thread that it is not guaranteed to work for all.
Some people have found workarounds, but there doesn't seem to be one definitive solution that works for everyone.
1) BenQ have some suggestions of thing to try here.
2) Some people have had luck by using a different cable.
3) In my case, a firmware update for my BenQ monitor (downloaded from BenQ's website) has almost entirely mitigated the problem - I now only get very occasional and very light flickering that last for only a few seconds.
Good luck!
Nice conclusion.
I wish anyone in this thread can reach one of the senior developers at Apple to report this 2-year-old issue. I know a lot of people have reported this bug through normal Apple Support and get no reply or Mac OS fix(including me).
Hello everyone. We have multiple Dell 4k Monitor models in the office, and I wanted to share what I think is a reliable workaround for the issue. This was tested by me since buying my M1 Max MBP in 2022, so this is the experience of over a year.
Monitors tested, all 4k:
- Dell UP2718Q - no problems
- Dell UP2720Q - flickering / ghosting (specially the blue kind people photographed here)
- Dell U2720Q - flickering / ghosting (specially the blue kind people photographed here)
- Dell U2723QE - no problems
The flickering issue seems to manifest itself more easily when displaying large areas of dark greens and reds. Here's how I got to this workaround.
Monitors tested, all 4k:
- Dell UP2718Q - no problems
- Dell UP2720Q - flickering / ghosting (specially the blue kind people photographed here)
- Dell U2720Q - flickering / ghosting (specially the blue kind people photographed here)
- Dell U2723QE - no problems
The flickering issue seems to manifest itself more easily when displaying large areas of dark greens and reds. Here's how I got to this workaround.
- I used f.lux at the time I bought my computer and every time f.lux kicked in the monitor started to flicker. Switched to Night Shift, in which the flickering seemed not to start as soon.
- I tested all manners of dongles, cables, docks and so on. No dice. Here were tested multiple Satechi dongles, Elgato Dock and Pro Dock, Razer Dock. Also high quality HDMI, Display Port, USB-C to HDMI, USB-C to DP and so. Nothing worked.
- After some time I stopped using Night Shift and True Tone. Seemed to improve.
- After some time I disabled DCC/CI on the problem monitors. This, combined with not using Night Shift and True Tone seemed to to the trick.
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Well, an interesting observation to be found among the results of the search request "Apple Silicon display flickering"
I have a different observation with Apple Mac Mini M1:
— Dell U2720Q through USB-C > DP cable adapter: sporadically flickering with the image retentions. Turn off/on cycle didn't help, solved after some time. Occurred from time to time
— Dell U2720Q through 3rd-party USB4 cable: didn't occur during the observable period (up to 6 months)
— Dell U3223QE through 3rd-party USB4 cable: flickering with large near-black windows and without image retention (Spotify app, Docker Dashboard, some websites in Chrome). BTW, neither Spotify nor Docker have many greens or reds in their UI. Changing a color profile in display settings momentarily helps as well as closing the window
— Dell U3223Q through USB-C > DP cable adapter: didn't occur during the observable period (up to 3 months).
In summary, I experienced two different kinds of flickering during the last 2.5 years. The first type is the worst because it's unpredictable and barely resolvable quickly.
It is so sad that Apple does not fix this.
Ive had this problem on two different monitors and I have been unable so solve it.
One monitor is an older EIZO Floris FS2434 and the other is a quite new LG Ultragear 38GN950.
The flickering happens very frequently on the Eizo but not very often on the LG.
When it first happened on the LG monitor I actually thought the monitor was broken because parts of the image got “burnt in”. Even when I switched to the other input where a Windows computer is connected. Very strange.
Ive had this problem on two different monitors and I have been unable so solve it.
One monitor is an older EIZO Floris FS2434 and the other is a quite new LG Ultragear 38GN950.
The flickering happens very frequently on the Eizo but not very often on the LG.
When it first happened on the LG monitor I actually thought the monitor was broken because parts of the image got “burnt in”. Even when I switched to the other input where a Windows computer is connected. Very strange.
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My Planar 5K monitor just shows a blank screen when connected using DisplayPort to USB-C to M2 Mac Mini. When I remote in, I see macOS is set to 5K resolution.
Thought I would give it a shot with a Dell Thunderbolt 4 dock and found that the display works when connected using the same cable to the dock.
Does anyone know why it would work via the T4 dock but not directly. I tried searching for DisplayPort to T4 cable but didn't find any. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
Thought I would give it a shot with a Dell Thunderbolt 4 dock and found that the display works when connected using the same cable to the dock.
Does anyone know why it would work via the T4 dock but not directly. I tried searching for DisplayPort to T4 cable but didn't find any. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
Hi,
Just wanted to let you (and everyone else) know that the Dell U2723QE is NOT a "safe" choice.
That is the monitor we use at work, and I have already sent back 10+ to dell for a replacement.
Thankfully the replacement units haven't shown the issue (yet).
Yeah, a real bummer.This is bummer, wanted to buy mini with some 4k monitor as secondary computer, dobt want flick fest at home
I think this needs some real attention. Does anyone have any connections with some "influencers"? 🙃
This would be a perfect fit for Linus Media Group to do some investigative reporting, now that he has that new lab and some skilled employees.
Since he is going to test monitors anyway for his website, maybe they can check if they are Mac compatible as well? And perhaps be able to find the root cause of this? If the solution is handed to Apple on a silver platter, maybe they will find the time to fix the problem? 😔
Perhaps this is something for Rtings to take a look at as well?
Thanks for the heads-up. I'll be sure to let you know if I encounter the same problems with it.
I have a Dell UP2720Q and I use a 3rd party USB-C to HDMI cable to connect my MBP Pro 16". It has been working fine without any flickering since May 2022. I also have night shift turned on.
The issue might not be as general, but more specific to certain batches?
I have also thought about that theory, that it is batch related, and not model related.
The Dell U2723QE monitors I've had the issue with have all been produces in mid-late 2022
All the replacements I've gotten have been produced in early-mid 2023, and they haven't shown any issues.
But then again, it would also be strange if it's multiple batches from multiple manufacturers in multiple models.
However, most of the panels are probably made by either samsung or lg, so it could make sense.
Thankfully the exchange process with Dell is really quick and easy. Especially when you have 10+ support tickets you can point to. They basically just send a replacement unit, no questions asked at this point.
Please, if an external hardware doesn't work with Windows, you think Microsoft is going to fix it? No, it's the manufacturer which has to fix it.
At launch of M1 Mac's, my audio interface did not work with Apple Silicon Mac's. But now it does. Did Apple fix anything? Nope, it was the manufacturer who fixed it to ensure it is compatible now with M1/M2 Mac's.
You think open source developers will fix all hardware issues on Linux too?
I wonder how long they will agree to keep sending replacements since the issue is clearly not with monitors (dell or otherwise) but with apple silicon.
Yes it is with the monitors, because there are monitors that don't have this issue with Apple Silicon.
But I let you guys keep thinking all external monitors have this problem with Apple Silicon.
Except all evidence so far points to this being an issue with apple silicon. If it affected a few specific monitors and was able to be reliably reproducible, one could argue that certain monitor manufacturers are doing something wrong with their products. Read this (and many other) threads, it is pretty clear that perfectly fine monitors (that even work flawlessly with apple's own intel based machine) 'suddenly' start exhibiting flickering and ghosting and image retention with apple silicon, and this is a monitor issue?
Yes, because I never had this "flickering issue" both on my old 4K Samsung display or my Apple Studio Display.
Dell simply need to make their displays M1/M2 Mac compatible, just like what the manufacturer of my audio interface had to do.