Flickering color bands within apps - M2 macOS

[jwschneider]

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.

[mjaroch]

Hello jwschneider,

Thank you for reaching out and for your detailed description of the issue.

We have received your message and will do our best to help you resolve this inconvenience.
Please wait for a message back from our engineering team.

Also, please make sure that you are using the latest version of DisplayLink driver.

[adi9090]

The same issue is happening to me with AndroidStudio, so this might be a combination of DisplayLink and Jetbrains tools.

What I noticed is the color shift with the default Darcula theme and after that it looks like the content shown is getting pixelated for a few seconds, and it gets back to the normal state. I'm using UGREEN Revodock 209 with the latest DisplayLink drivers 1.12.1 build 54 with display port cables. This is happening with M2 Pro 16GB RAM and M3 Pro 36GB RAM laptops running MacOS 15.4.1

Both of AndroidStudio and PyCharm are up to date and I'm using the latest version of these IDEs.

Below is the video that shows the pixelation issue, it is mostly visible with the Firefox icon and two screenshots of Firefox and PyCharm icons where you can see clear degradation in image quality.
GDrive video URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TdN...usp=drive_link
GDrive images URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ihr...usp=drive_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jv8...usp=drive_link

This is the GDrive URL to the DisplayLink tool for collecting logs: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19oU...usp=drive_link

[mcdamo]

I'm experiencing the same issue in Intellij since I updated DisplayLinkManager but I don't have the issue if I go back to DisplayLink Manager Graphics Connectivity1.10.3

[mjaroch]

Hello mcdamo,

Please contact our support team and provide us with additional insights.
You can do so by following these steps.