d0rkorg

I recently upgraded to nVidia’s latest drivers (v77.72) for my GeForce 6800 GT and noticed a horrible gamma problem when playing any movies with VLC or Windows Media Player. Everything was flooded and oversaturated, could barely make out some scenes.

So, I did some looking into the issue and it appears that the default gamma setting through some type of bug in this particular version of the driver is 3.something - way, way too high. You can view the setting by going into the video card properties, Video Overlay Settings, then clicking on the Adjust Colors button. You’ll need a workaround to fix this bug because the gamma slider won’t let you put it at 1, the proper gamma level. Instead of Overlay in the dropdown selector, choose All. Then, put the slider on 1 and hit the Restore Defaults button. That should set the overlay settings back to 1 - don’t try to adjust the overlay gamma setting directly, it just doesn’t work.

I’ve been noticing the declining QA in commercial software, but I was still somewhat surprised that something like this made it past nVidia’s QA process. Only after much searching did I find this solution - I wonder how many people have been bitten by this bug.