Nvidia and game visual quality

[soccerballtux]

Oh my gosh I think I'm going to have to send this card back if I can! It's horrible!

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
Text

I noticed this on my 6800GT but I thought it was just something funky about the card because it did this with hardware accelerated video as well.

Now with my 8800GT I'm finding the same.

I'm not happy with this. These are not the accurate colors! It's like they make everything darker so that the browns and dark colors can be rendered as blacks.

I've heard of questionable driver optimizations to make things run better, and I'm guessing this is it. What can I do? I have this same problem with UT3.

Using 169.21.

WoW is not best choice for graphics image quality,btw have you checked in Nvidia display panel that texture filtering is set to high quality?

I use ColorVison Spyder2Express for my monitor calibration,makes a difference.

 

[CP5670]

If the colors are actually black and not just dark (play around with the gamma to test this), it's a color settings issue on the software side. Digital vibrance should be off, and you want to make sure any brightness or contrast correction settings in the driver are set to zero as they would clip off the color space like this. Apart from that, it's possible that the games themselves have their own brightness options that are doing the same thing.

The UT3 screenshots look okay to me. I think the tone mapping from the HDR is supposed to make those areas fully black.

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: CP5670
If the colors are actually black and not just dark (play around with the gamma to test this), it's a color settings issue on the software side. Digital vibrance should be off, and you want to make sure any brightness or contrast correction settings in the driver are set to zero as they would clip off the color space like this. Apart from that, it's possible that the games themselves have their own brightness options that are doing the same thing.

The UT3 screenshots look okay to me. I think the tone mapping from the HDR is supposed to make those areas fully black.

I don't think they're fully black because turning up gamma all the way makes them visible (is my conclusion right?); but at the expense of the lighter colors going to white. In UT2004, and also in WoW in certain areas, its like the drivers try to push the contrast lower where it's already dark, turning it black, making it easier to render (conspiracy theory).

So what does this mean? What can I do to get rid of this? I feel like the drivers are saying "ok you have 20-bits of color definition to work with, now you can choose to see either the dark colors or the light colors accurately."

 

[madh83]

Are you sure it's not your monitor's problem?

 

[soccerballtux]

You didn't look at the pics did you

Originally posted by: Andvari
The fact that we can see it as being too dark, means it is not an issue with his monitor.

After playing around with the settings some, I guess I've come to accept that maybe this is simply the UT3 engine; that we would see the same thing on ATI's cards. I've been posting around on several forums trying to figure out what's going on, and that idea popped up. It makes sense-- I just don't like seeing that black when I know there's a texture there. Maybe I should complain to Epic instead.