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Windows 11 smaller resolutions are very dark

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First post, by Caesum

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I bought a new laptop recently and since then I've been noticing that more and more games are shockingly dark compared to when I played them on my older laptop. I've been looking around and honestly I don't know what to do anymore. I am using a two display setup, one is a 2560 x 1440 (QHD) 165Hz built in display and the other 920x1080p 60Hz external display.

It seems that whenever a game uses a fullscreen resolution smaller than 1176x664, the entire screen becomes significantly darker. Meaning every game with 640x480, 800x600 or even 1024x768 resolution is extremely dark. It doesn't seem to be related particular games or DirectX version (happens in 5-8 and 9, not sure about newer). Interestingly enough, when I print screen such a game, the picture actually looks correct (attached a mockup screen of the issue).

I tried the external display on another laptop and the games looked fine there, so it's not a monitor issue. I have also checked if maybe my monitor has different settings for each resolutions, but also no, they stay the same.

This is extremely annoying, especially in games like Black Mirror 1, where dgvoodoo2 doesn't work to well, so I cannot upscale resolution.

Does anyone know how to fix that?

My specs:
Laptop Lenovo Legion 5 15ACH6H

AMD Ryzen 5 5600H (3,30Ghz) with Radeon Graphics + Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 6023 MB VRAM

16 GB RAM

SSD Samsung MZVLB1T0HBLR-000L2

Lith-Polymer battery 60Wh 15.36 V/17.37V

230 WAT Power Brick

2560 x 1440 (QHD) 165Hz (with 60Hz option too)

Windows 11 Home 64-bit

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Reply 3 of 4, by BEEN_Nath_58

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Caesum wrote on 2024-01-02, 18:13:

GAMMA slider doesn't seem to affect anything in Black Mirror. In other games sometimes they don't have brightness settings, sometimes they do but the screen is off because contrast is also wrong.

Enable the AllowMaximizedWindowGamma shim from Application Compatibility Toolkit for the game.

I don't remember if the driver has gamma setting as well.

previously known as Discrete_BOB_058

Reply 4 of 4, by Caesum

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I tried it (on both bgmirror and agds) but still nothing. Infact when I reload the game gamma setting slider reverts back to default position. At this point I wonder if it might be a better idea to find out why small resolutions in games have way darker graphics in general.

EDIT: I think I found out the reson why small resolutions are so dark on my monitor! I have BenQ ZOWIE RL2755 monitor and I have just found out it has an option called HDMI RGB PC Range. When it is set to RGB(16~235), it makes colors a bit more saturated and blacks darker... But that's what happens in high resolutions. In smaller resolutions, it gives flat blackness to darker games. I changed option to RGB(0~255) and Black Mirror suddenly became much brighter and there's no visible shift in gamma when I switch between 1176x664 and lower resolutions.

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