MacBook Pro External Monitor Flicker

Question

DevGuru Author

Level 1

10 points

MacBook Pro External Monitor Flicker

I have a MBP Retina 15" late 2013 model.

I have connected it to an external monitor via the HDMI port.

Sometimes the external monitor will flicker or have the tv snow.

I have read all the posts about resetting the PRAM or SMC or whatever and have followed all of those steps.

I also have a docking station that has HDMI on it. It doesn't matter if I connect to the MBP HDMI or the docking station HDMI. Either way I get the problem.

It did this with Mavericks and now with Yosemite.

I have tried different cables.

The monitor has HDMI input and DVI input. I have tried both.

I used to have a different external monitor and that one had the same problem.

My conclusions:

It is not the cable(s).

It is not the monitor(s).

It is not the PRAM or SMC.

It is not the OS version specifically.

The big question is, what is the problem? Does anyone have any other ideas I can try?

I suspect it is the video card design or drivers.

Or it is something else in the system interfering.

It could also be that the MBP just isn't fast enough to keep up with a high rez external monitor and when the system gets busy the external monitor doesn't get the time slices it needs to draw so it glitches. If that is the case then we all may just be out of luck.

If there is a solution I would love to hear it because this is very annoying and hurts my productivity.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Jan 28, 2016 6:40 AM

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Answer 1

brenden dv

Community Specialist

Jan 29, 2016 12:36 PM in response to DevGuru

Hi DevGuru,

Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities. I'm sorry to hear you are having these issues with your MacBook Pro and your external display. It sounds like you have been on the right track in your troubleshooting. If you continue to have display issues, you may find the troubleshooting steps outlined in the following article helpful, up to and including contacting Apple Support directly if necessary:

Get help with video issues on external displays connected to your Mac - Apple Support

Regards

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Answer 2

DevGuru Author

Level 1

10 points

Jan 29, 2016 2:12 PM in response to brenden dv

Thank you. I have tried these things and none of them have solved the problem.

Sometimes it happens a lot and sometimes not at all. I have not been able to figure out a pattern.

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Answer 3

brenden dv

Community Specialist

Jan 30, 2016 2:00 PM in response to DevGuru

Hi DevGuru,

Thanks again for using the Apple Support Communities; I'm sorry to hear you are still having this issue. If you have gone through the above linked article completely without reaching a resolution or a direction for further troubleshooting, you may be better served by reaching out to one of Apple's other available resources for more direct assistance - https://getsupport.apple.com/GetproductgroupList.action

Regards

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Answer 4

DevGuru Author

Level 1

10 points

Feb 12, 2016 9:40 AM in response to brenden dv

I decided to try lowering the resolution of the external monitor.

So far the flicker has stopped completely. If I raise the resolution back up the flickering starts again.

This tells me that there is some kind of an engineering problem in the hardware, drivers or software. Somehow the Macbook is not able to keep up with the higher resolution.

Since I am sure there are plenty of people out there who don't have any flicker I would guess there is probably some other piece to the puzzle. Maybe something in my software or configuration is taking up more processing time or something that causes the video to not keep up with the higher resolution, but that is just a guess.

The bottom line is that there is a problem that I cannot fix and having to lower the resolution is not an acceptable solution.

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