Nvidia cards, Hardware Calibration, HDR and Banding

newuser

newuser

newuser

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25 Aug 2005
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Hi,

I've got a 20 series card connected to a 4 year old mid range Samsung TV and a 30 series card connected to a HDR1000 edge lit monitor.

The banding bothers me the most, I'm aware of the reshade debanding filter for games.

HDR is non existent on the TV and worse than SDR on the monitor. The monitor can do black to painful without HDR enabled, It's a Phillips 436M6. The TV does nothing exciting at all.

Would buying a spyderx pro and calibrating the displays help with either issue? I've googled and I'm more confused than when I started.

Thanks.
 
I can't say I fully understand the problem you have, but I really doubt a spyderx pro and calibrating would help. I've got an i1Display calibrator. What they do is measure the output from the display, and with help from what they detect using the software:

1) Help you adjust the controls (if any) on the monitor for things like brightness, RGB control etc... to achieve the best colour accuracy and your desired brightness as much as possible with the hardware controls, then
2) Create an ICM profile and apply it to the monitor. This is a sort of look up table, intended to account for differences between what your graphics card sends and what the display actually outputs in response to that. Again, enhanced colour accuracy is the result.

Neither of those things are likely to help with banding especially.

Could you give us some photos to illustrate the problem? Display a banding test image full screen then take the best photo you can.

Here's a 1080p banding test image:
https://www.rtings.com/images/test-materials/2016/gradient-16-bit.tif

I looked for a 4k one but didn't find one yet, if anyone else has one please share :)

With regard to HDR it can be a struggle to actually get it working - I've got mine up and running using Media Player Classic Home Cinema with MadVR as the renderer. Grab a demo video such as this one:
https://4kmedia.org/lg-new-york-hdr-uhd-4k-demo/

You'll know if you have it correct as the colours will be very vibrant. If I play that one on my system my monitor switches to HDR mode as it detects the signal, but when playing the video in a window the colour looks very grey and washed out. Once I double click it to make it full screen, then it switches properly and has vivid colour.
 
Hi, thanks for the input. I can enable HDR and it looks fine in videos but not a great deal different to SDR. I understand that's a limitiation of the displays. In most games I get higher brightness but washed out colours. It looks better just leaving it in SDR and bumping the brightness a notch, so I wondered if it was possible to do a calibration while in HDR mode and get a more usable profile?

Banding is apparent on both displays if I look for it, even in my VR headset. It's probably an issue with the content more than anything. I've seen mention of hacks to enable dithering in the drivers, reshade filters and the suggestion that calibrating the displays may help. I wondered if anyone had experience of trying to fix it?
 
I can't say I've tried to calibrate in HDR mode - sadly my current calibrator is quite a few years old and doesn't support that, it looks like you'd need the "i1Display Pro Plus" model to be able to do HDR calibration.

With regard to using HDR in games the colours will be washed out unless the game is actually designed to support it (Red Dead Redemption 2 for example has a HDR mode), for anything else you'll be better leaving it in SDR.

I managed to find a reasonable HDR 10 bit colour video designed to test for banding issues - on my system I get a little banding in the yellow/green at some points, but not much overall. This might help you test if it's the content rather than the system itself:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iFIQ8v2HtzZsA7f6sKv1tVUEmrFMFkJZ/view?usp=sharing
 
Thanks for that, very slight banding on the TV, none on the monitor. Seems to be a content issue, mostly in games, sometimes on the background of desktop apps.
I've tried reshade on a couple of the worst gaming offenders and it helps. I'll stick with that and stop worrying about it.
 
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