Bought a new monitor for pc gaming. Should it look like this?
September 29, 2013 9:27 AM   Subscribe

I just bought the Asus VG248QE after reading many reviews stating it was excellent for pc gaming. While it appears to be pretty damn good, I'm a little thrown off by how dark scenes look in a few games I've tried. I also can't seem to recall if they looked like this on my old monitor also or if this is a symptom of the new one.

Here are a few shots I took. The first image is from the game Outlast, the second is from Battlefield 3, the third is an in-game screenshot of BF3 so you can compare it to what it looks like on the monitor.

http://imgur.com/a/9CuAC

I'm running these games at Ultra/Max settings at the monitor's maximum resolution.

This is some sort of dithering issue, correct? This review says the dithering is fine and doesn't note anything out of the ordinary: http://pcmonitors.info/reviews/asus-vg248qe

Is this a symptom of the type of monitor this, a setting I should be toggling in the monitor or game's settings, etc.? Thanks!
posted by rbf1138 to Technology (8 answers total)
 
Tried turning up the gamma settings in the game? I presume you've fiddled with the brightness on the monitor itself.
posted by Punkey at 9:52 AM on September 29, 2013


Have you adjusted the shadows at all in the games? Arma 3 was lookin' real terrible in a way sort of like that until I turned the shadow quality up.

Have you also installed the newest drivers for your card?
posted by thylacine at 10:11 AM on September 29, 2013


Response by poster: I have the shadows on high and have the newest Catalyst beta drivers. And yeah, fiddled and calibrated all that stuff.
posted by rbf1138 at 11:16 AM on September 29, 2013


Are you talking about the roundy blobs?

One way to test this would be to open a window that's all black, like an MS Paint window filled black, and moving it around the screen. If the blobs stay in the same place when you move the window, there is something wrong with the monitor.
posted by gjc at 12:29 PM on September 29, 2013


Are you cranking up the monitor brightness, or is the default brightness very high? Try turning it back down to something sane (I usually run my HP monitor at minimum possible brightness in the evenings for instance) and tweak the gamma setting in the graphics driver or your game settings instead.

If the monitor supports it, you could try changing the colour space default to sRGB.

This review on Amazon says that the reviewer had to tweak the monitor a far bit both in the monitor & graphics driver settings to get acceptable colour performance.
posted by pharm at 3:09 PM on September 29, 2013


On a lot of monitors, tiresomely, turning the brightness up more than a certain percentage(or on some, at all) simply adjusts the black level.

And then you end up with all kinds of weirdness, and general crappiness. Definitely play with the brightness level.
posted by emptythought at 6:29 PM on September 29, 2013 [1 favorite]


emptythought: "On a lot of monitors, tiresomely, turning the brightness up more than a certain percentage(or on some, at all) simply adjusts the black level."

And that's exactly how it should be. Despite the names, you set the black level with the brightness control and the white with the contrast. Despite much uninformed BS floating around the 'net, that's still the case even on LCD monitors. If you're doing it the other way around, you're doing it wrong…
posted by Pinback at 11:08 PM on September 29, 2013 [2 favorites]


And that's exactly how it should be. Despite the names, you set the black level with the brightness control and the white with the contrast. Despite much uninformed BS floating around the 'net, that's still the case even on LCD monitors. If you're doing it the other way around, you're doing it wrong…

Seconding. As I understand it, the brightness control is for adjusting to the room's level of brightness. You turn it down until the black is as black as it can be, and then you raise the contrast until just before the white starts washing out. More or less.
posted by gjc at 5:15 PM on October 5, 2013


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