Flickering color bands within apps - M2 macOS

jwschneider · 04-09-2025, 02:30 PM

Hi,

Something I'm observing is the flickering of only color bands, only in darkmode, as far as I can tell, when there are contrasting colors stacked on top of eachother. It's not that the app crashes or that the DisplayLink rendering just shuts off the monitor - it's specifically a flicker of the colors, as if there some kind of PWM effect occurring, that would regress and then reset the bit depth of the color. The anti-aliasing gets slightly worse, the color of the high contrast color - say, green - becomes just off. And then it flickers back to the correct color frame, and then it flickers back to incorrect - pretty rapidly. It may seem nominal as issues go but it is quite distracting and bothersome.

It does not do this all the time. At first I thought this was only an IntelliJ issue - see my Youtrack bug report here https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue...7-11825809.0-0

You can see there is another user in the discussion that also is facing this issue and he too is using a DisplayLink dock. In any event, I began to notice this issue in Discord, recently. I have begin to suspect perhaps DisplayLink is the culprit - when I hook up external monitors to my M2 mac directly, not using the DisplayLink Dock, they do not see issue. When I am plugged into my dock, my macbook's retina display also does not this issue. This combined with the fact that someone else is seeing this issue, they have a DisplayLink dock, and I'm seeing it in not only IntelliJ but discord... I think DisplayLink is the common thread, here.

I don't know if this will ever be seen by devs but I used the macOS DisplayLink data collection tool to collect whatever data it needs, while I observed the flickering happening.

M2 Pro, 32GB, Sequoia 15.3.2, on an enterprise managed device.

04-09-2025, 02:30 PM	#1
jwschneider Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2025 Posts: 1	Flickering color bands within apps - M2 macOS Hi, Something I'm observing is the flickering of only color bands, only in darkmode, as far as I can tell, when there are contrasting colors stacked on top of eachother. It's not that the app crashes or that the DisplayLink rendering just shuts off the monitor - it's specifically a flicker of the colors, as if there some kind of PWM effect occurring, that would regress and then reset the bit depth of the color. The anti-aliasing gets slightly worse, the color of the high contrast color - say, green - becomes just off. And then it flickers back to the correct color frame, and then it flickers back to incorrect - pretty rapidly. It may seem nominal as issues go but it is quite distracting and bothersome. It does not do this all the time. At first I thought this was only an IntelliJ issue - see my Youtrack bug report here https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue...7-11825809.0-0 You can see there is another user in the discussion that also is facing this issue and he too is using a DisplayLink dock. In any event, I began to notice this issue in Discord, recently. I have begin to suspect perhaps DisplayLink is the culprit - when I hook up external monitors to my M2 mac directly, not using the DisplayLink Dock, they do not see issue. When I am plugged into my dock, my macbook's retina display also does not this issue. This combined with the fact that someone else is seeing this issue, they have a DisplayLink dock, and I'm seeing it in not only IntelliJ but discord... I think DisplayLink is the common thread, here. I don't know if this will ever be seen by devs but I used the macOS DisplayLink data collection tool to collect whatever data it needs, while I observed the flickering happening. M2 Pro, 32GB, Sequoia 15.3.2, on an enterprise managed device. Last edited by jwschneider; 04-09-2025 at 06:37 PM.