This discussion has a whopping 31 pages. What is the current status of this issue? Are there any workaround or fixes yet? If anyone could summarise the results of this long discussion it would be awesome. Thanks
FYI y'all, a few weeks after this reply, as of March 2024 a solution has finally been released.
Here is how to fix external monitor flicker, graininess, and hard-to-read text on Apple Silicon Macs in 2024:
Stillcolor by aiaf
https://github.com/aiaf/Stillcolor
Was annoying me for years, plugging my Apple Silicon Mac into monitors I would notice flickering, especially on transparency effects where one of my older monitors would straight up be noticeably and obviously flashing. I could also see "dotted patterns" on darker shades of gray, including Dark Mode windows, that was really messing with color accurate design. None of my Intel Macs had this problem at all.
If you install this app, make sure
"Disable Dithering" is checked in the status bar icon (then set it to launch at login),
the flicker issue will entirely vanish. Finally my Apple Silicon Mac has the exact same clean external monitor output as my Intel Macs.
It is a pretty simple open-source app, basically it disables one property in the IOMobileFramebuffer registry that was
intentionally added by Apple, which causes this flicker pattern (with an apparent goal of reducing color banding). Unfortunately Apple's "effect" makes the screen even worse,
especially on old and color-inaccurate monitors where this flicker is very obvious in Dark Mode. There is usually no official toggle to turn it off. Stillcolor finally makes it possible to disable it.
As a side effect it will make shades of gray look much crisper and cleaner too, for example the background of Discord is now a very sharp uniform solid gray on my monitor instead of looking somewhat hazy and cloudy!
The only downside is that if you
also use a "screen dimming" app that adds a black overlay to your external monitor, color banding will become more noticeable. However, all of the benefits outweigh the cons IMO.
Tested on 3 monitors, a recent-ish 2K monitor, an older 1080p one, and an ancient low res monitor from the 2000s. All 3 used to have the flicker issue on Apple Silicon (with the 2000s monitor being the worst) but not at all on Intel.
With the Stillcolor app, finally all 3 monitors are entirely free of any additional flicker on Apple Silicon.
By the way, the same toggle is planned to be added to BetterDisplay in the near future — a "GPU Dithering" toggle under Image Adjustments has appeared in some recent beta builds!
Now the only thing left is to ask Apple themselves to implement the same exact toggle — which already internally exists within the OS — in their own System Settings. File those feedback radars y'all! Even mention iOS, as this same issue occurs on iOS display output and there isn't a way to solve it there yet.
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Bonus: Have you ever noticed a "fading to slightly darker colors" effect at the edges of your XDR mini-LED MacBook display? Some cases of "uneven" or "dirty" white backgrounds on M2/M3 MacBook Airs?
Stillcolor can fix these too — just check the second box called
"disable uniformity2D". (Ironically enough, disabling this additional effect used by Apple actually makes the displays appear
more uniform to me.)
Finally, if you're running this app on an Apple Silicon Mac with an IPS LCD
internal display such as a MacBook Air or
*Touch Bar* 13" MacBook Pro — after "Disable Dithering"
you may also notice an increase in text readability on your laptop's built-in display as well! The most significant improvement to the built-in display happens on
specifically the Touch Bar models.
This is because the same flicker pattern
was actually being added to internal display output too, just in a more subtle way that is much less obvious. Ever felt text slightly "shimmer" or "twitch" while reading on your laptop? It's not your eyes, it's the screen! It is also disabled with the same toggle!
🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀
