MBP flickering on specific shades of dark gray

I'm on a 2010 13" MBP, and displaying certain darker shades of gray will result in fairly noticeable flickering, at least when the shade of gray is covering the whole screen. This is especially apparent at the highest brightness setting. I know that there are certain patterns that can result in flickering, but I wasn't aware that the same was true for solid colors?!

Specifically, I can provoke the flickering by displaying a full-screen solid color at a brightness of 21% on the gray scale...



The effect is not noticeable at this size, so you'll have to click on the image, for the 1280x800 version, or use Preview.app to scale it up to even higher resolutions. You'll probably want to raise the brightness to the highest level as well.

It's even weirder than I thought. It seems that if a certain color dominates the screen, the whole screen starts to flicker, including colored parts that otherwise wouldn't. Is anyone able to explain or verify this?

Here are two pictures. They both contain rectangles colored in the same way, only differently sized. In Full Screen mode, the first one shows no noticeable flicker. The second one, on the other hand, results in significant flickering in both the larger left part as well as the smaller right part.

codymac said:

FWIW, my 15" MBP does this when it's running Intel graphics but doesn't do it on the AMD.

Click to expand...

Would you mind checking whether that's also true for the first picture I posted? (I don't think the link was working before)