Fixed: Nvidia issue, Colors Wash out after Reboots, Games

[Ketchup]

I don't know if any of you have come across this before, but I have been seeing this for years. It wasn't a big deal until my latest display, an Asus VS-248H-P.

For some reason, after playing with monitor settings as much as I can, the display always has a washed out look. I found it has to do with a limit to the RGB range.

So if anyone else is having this issue, this guy put together a nice little executable that will fix the registry error causing this problem. Enjoy!

http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?p=83

 

[lehtv]

Apparently this is a HDMI-only issue?

 

[hawtdawg]

I thought they fixed this in the newer drivers?

Pathetic really, this has been an issue for years. I don't see how people can praise Nvidia for driver quality with crap like this.

 

[Ketchup]

I think it is HDMI. My last monitor was HDMI (no DVI), but the card at the time didn't have it, so I got an HDMI to DVI cable. The Asus has both, but I just kept the cable.

It bugged me today because I had just done a driver update and still had the issue, so my search got more intense.

It's more an annoyance than a big "issue." Most of the time I am not even paying attention. Never had an issue with drivers crashing or game performance.

 

[3DVagabond]

Any idea why nVidia did this in the first place? Has anyone "fixed" it and ended up with other issues?

 

[Ketchup]

I believe Nvidia's thought process is that TVs only support a limited range of RGB, so if you are using HDMI, you don't want the full range.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Any idea why nVidia did this in the first place? Has anyone "fixed" it and ended up with other issues?

They "did it" because TV's use a different color range than computer monitor's use (i.e. black is 16,16,16 RGB on a TV but 0,0,0 RGB on a computer monitor, white is 235,235,235 on a TV and 255,255,255 on a computer monitor). And because HDMI as a standard is designed for TV's, Nvidia encodes the output of the data to be appropriate for the medium.

 

[96Firebird]

To expand on what Fallen Kell said, I did a little reading up on it while taking a poop.

Back when HDMI was just a TV standard, Nvidia used the TV's RGB values because if they used full RGB, the lower values (0,0,0-16,16,16) would all appear as 16,16,16 (same situation for upper values) and cause the shadows to look too dark (all black) and the highlights to look too bright (all white). With the limited values, the out-of-range values are "compacted" into the limited range.

My potty source

 

[Deders]

With the newer drivers, if you go to Adjust Desktop Colour Settings in the NV control panel, you can switch dynamic range from Limited to Full. That should sort things out.

 

[3DVagabond]

I believe Nvidia's thought process is that TVs only support a limited range of RGB, so if you are using HDMI, you don't want the full range.

Makes sense.

 

[Ketchup]

With the newer drivers, if you go to Adjust Desktop Colour Settings in the NV control panel, you can switch dynamic range from Limited to Full. That should sort things out.

I tried it before I started the thread. It went right back to limited the next time I restarted.

 

[sheh]

There's still no solution for Windows XP (old computer, old games), even with the latest drivers.

HDMI TVs can also support full range color, and TVs can report it thru the EDID. Still, Nvidia ignored it.

And I thought that the fact that AMD doesn't update their XP drivers often made them the worse choice...