Monitor-gamma question

[Max]

My Gateway 24" monitor (1920x1200) is about 5 yrs old. Everything other than AH looks great. In-game, using standard gamma setting of 1.0 the external views, plane dashboard are very dark. I need to set gamma to 1.5 but then I get wash out to some degree.

My vid settings are hi-res 2048 (yes I have the latest hi-res download)...the FOV is 100...antialiasing slider is set about 1/3'd towards the right. My GPU is NV 9800 GTX+ and the FR is good to very good. So why can't I get a decent looking view at 1.0 gamma? Can you guys suggest which settings I should be using in the NVidea control panel? Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

[Bizman]

I have a Benq of about the same age and similar native resolution. It has about half a dozen presets for different uses, named "photo", "movie", "standard", "Rgb" etc. and they can be changed anytime instantly. They really differ from each other! Look if your Gateway has something similar.

As an overall advice I've learned that adjusting the picture should always start with the monitor adjustment tool and only after they can't give you the desired result you should alter the video card's default settings. IIRC adjusting through the hardware instead of software should reduce the load of the video card, giving you better performance.

[Max]

My Gateway has the same user defined tweaks. They help a bit. I'll try the card default settings and see if that helps. I'm basically clueless on the various NVid CP options i.e. trilinear, anisotropic, anti aliasing...etc

[ImADot]

Without external hardware to calibrate your display, this web site is pretty good at helping you to adjust your monitor for best overall display quality. It might help. My 24" Samsung LCD is about 3 years old and looks great with every game/app that I run - including Aces High.

[Bizman]

ImADot's suggestion might help you to get your monitor settings right. Remember to start from scratch, setting both your monitor and video card settings to their defaults. Then adjust only the monitor until you either are satisfied or you reach the limits, forcing you to continue in the video card settings. Insufficient brightness and contrast settings in an older monitor often are symptoms of a nearing end.

IMO you'd better leave all the settings you mentioned to their defaults and use AH video settings instead. Anti aliasing smoothens slanted sawtooth lines to look less jagged by adding in-between hues between darker and lighter "teeth". Anisotrophic filtering adjusts the surface textures according to your suggested viewing point, kind of correcting the perspective of subsequent tiles seamless, thus clearing the view to far. Trilinear filtering is somewhat related to that.

Just leave those to default and do the adjusting in AH, starting from zero and working your way to the point you feel like you're sacrificing your playability to eye candy. Read Waffle's tips in the Tech support section.

[Randy1]

I had the same problem.   Built into windows 7 is pretty good monitor calibration program.  Right click screen Personlize-Display then Calibrate color..

The gamma setting is first which is the hardest ti set.  If you don't see the X they are talking about on the guys shirt start again and choose a higher initial gamma.  I got mine straight with the W7 program.

[Max]

Thanks gents. Re-setting the card and monitor to default helped a lot.