[GUIDE] Fixing the gamma on the Asus ROG Swift PG278Q

[Monstieur]

There's a simple way to fix the gamma on your particular monitor without using the unreliable nVidia control panel settings or someone's random ICC profile.

Open the following page and scroll down to the gamma section till the image is at the height of your eyes at a normal seating position.
http://glennmessersmith.com/images/adjust.htm

Open Colour Management and choose Advanced > Change System Defaults. Click Calibrate Display. Skip forward without changing any settings till your get to the Gamma page. Then reduce the size of the window so you can see the browser in the background. Adjust the gamma slider till the image in the browser becomes perfectly gray from your normal seating position. Skip through all the other pages without changing anything. This will properly set the gamma for your monitor throughout Windows. Once I did this I was surprised at the rich colour quality for a TN panel.

Some games let you use the native Windows gamma ramp. E.g. Source engine has a -nogammaramp switch. When you use this switch the gamma slider in the game gets disabled. For other games you must perform the gamma adjustment in the game's settings according to their instructions.

 

[Falkentyne]

Thanks,
But why can't the swift just come with 2.2 gamma out of the box?
2.2 gamma is 2.2 gamma.
There's no excuse for some of them coming with 1.4-1.8....

 

[Monstieur]

Thanks,
But why can't the swift just come with 2.2 gamma out of the box?
2.2 gamma is 2.2 gamma.
There's no excuse for some of them coming with 1.4-1.8....

It is exactly 2.2 out of the box... when measured with a colorimeter that is exactly 90 degrees perpendicular to the surface of the screen. My Spyder3Elite detects it as exactly 2.2 gamma and 6500K white point. The factory calibration is actually highly accurate.

But due to TN viewing angles and your seating height, you have to manually readjust the gamma to suit your position. Viewing angle is basically gamma shift. This monitor in particular seems to have extreme gamma shift. You need to compensate for it, that's all.

 

[chenw]

Actually even if I had the monitor headon the colors doesn't look as nice straight out of the box as the setting I have it right now. This is definitely a quick but still effective fix.

I currently have it so that the top of my monitor is slightly closer to my eyes than the bottom in order to compensate for the black crush (it's far more noticeable on top than the bottom due to the way foreground and background are presented), and this does make things look MUCH closer to my old IPS monitor.

How only if games weren't so hellbent on using their own color profiles, I'd consider Swift to be a totally acceptable alternative to Predator given lack of availability of the latter here. D3 is notorious for having its own useless gamma slider (the thing is closer to brightness slider), thank god for the existence of borderless windowed mode though.

 

[skuko]

wow, this makes so much difference. thanks! now it basically matches the colors or the eizo ev2736 i have standing next to it! makes much difference when watching movies (love g-sync for movies,no tearing)

 

[Koizumi]

incredible. movie files that looked washed out look fine now. I assume this works on all monitors and not just the rog swift? Its miles better then the icc profile i was using from tftcentral

 

[Malangyar]

Looks a lot better, but you can't keep the image perfectly grey everywhere on the monitor. E.g. if you have the image in the center of your monitor and calibrate, and then move the image to the left side of your monitor, the image will no longer be grey.

 

[dmonkey]

This is mostly placebo, unless you have a bad Swift, gamma is going to be off if you make this adjustment anywhere but in the center of your screen. The reason is TN gamma shift obviously. Still, if it looks better to you it's not a bad thing to do this per se unless you're inexplicably using the Swift for color-accurate work.

 

[Malangyar]

Bloody TN, I really need to get hold of the new Acer IPS monitor...

 

[Monstieur]

This is mostly placebo, unless you have a bad Swift, gamma is going to be off if you make this adjustment anywhere but in the center of your screen. The reason is TN gamma shift obviously. Still, if it looks better to you it's not a bad thing to do this per se unless you're inexplicably using the Swift for color-accurate work.

Not if the original gamma never overlapped 2.2 at all. My Swift looked like 1.6 to 1.8 from edge to edge. It was uniformly over bright. Now it's 2.2 at the middle which is far better.

 

[General Lee]

This is simply a quality control issue with the PG278Q. Some of the displays come with ridiculously low gamma by default, and there is no gamma adjustment available in the OSD menu. If the image looks washed out, chances are you got a unit with miscalibrated gamma and you should ask for a replacement. The software options won't help with fullscreen games, and the only thing you can do is use the in-game gamma slider. That said, no amount of tinkering or panel lottery will help with the inherent viewing-angle related shifts of the TN panel, so it'll never look as good as the Acer IPS panel.

 

[dmonkey]

Not if the original gamma never overlapped 2.2 at all. My Swift looked like 1.6 to 1.8 from edge to edge. It was uniformly over bright. Now it's 2.2 at the middle which is far better.

Oh, I see. Yeah, that's unfortunate, and this tweak will help a lot.

 

[Monstieur]

The weird thing is my colorimeter measures it at exactly 2.2 gamma on the surface. The gamma is probably grossly shifting just by looking at it from a distance, apart from vertical shift.

 

[MaelstromOC]

I've had my monitor since October of last year and have just now read about some of the units being shipped with the gamma way off. I'm pretty sure mine suffers from this problem because the first thing I did when I turned it on and loaded into windows was turn the gamma all the way down to .70 in the NVCPL. That made the monitor look MUCH better, but then I constantly had problems with Windows forgetting the gamma settings, having to reset them constantly if I alt tab and it switches back to default, etc.

You guys think there's anything I could do about that now? Or is it far too late?

 

[Monstieur]

I've had my monitor since October of last year and have just now read about some of the units being shipped with the gamma way off. I'm pretty sure mine suffers from this problem because the first thing I did when I turned it on and loaded into windows was turn the gamma all the way down to .70 in the NVCPL. That made the monitor look MUCH better, but then I constantly had problems with Windows forgetting the gamma settings, having to reset them constantly if I alt tab and it switches back to default, etc.

You guys think there's anything I could do about that now? Or is it far too late?

Use the Windows calibration instead of nVidia's. It doesn't get reset.

 

[stanc87]

Thanks for sharing! Made my Swift look a lot closer to my previous IPS display

 

[Polar_Fox]

How only if games weren't so hellbent on using their own color profiles,

Games don't use their own color profiles, they don't use color profiles at all. This is a common misconception that games use their own "color space" or gamma ramps.
The reality is much more simple, they either reset gpu gamma ramp to default or ignore windows icc profiles. This is done just to implement gamma adjustments sliders in option menus so that gamers who have no idea about picture quality would be able to somewhat alleviate their monitor's crappy factory settings by following simple instructions given with gamma adjustment in game's menus.

 

[MaelstromOC]

Use the Windows calibration instead of nVidia's. It doesn't get reset.

Just wanted to say thanks for this. Although I just found this thread looking this problem up again, using the Windows Calibration tool is what I did about 15 minutes ago and I have to move the slider all the way to the minimum. However, that does hit just about the same as my .7 setting in the nvcpl (and a little color tweaking to get white looking proper) and it looks great. I just can't believe some were sent out with the gamma so far off point from what I had read in reviews.

 

[Monstieur]

I found out the correct seating height for this monitor (and in general) is to have your eyes parallel to the top edge of the screen. Then when you look down at the rest of the screen everything is almost the same gamma. So sit with your eyes at the top edge, and adjust the gamma slider such that the middle of the screen looks grey.

 

[Bageland2000]

OMG this radically improved my monitor. THANK YOU!!!

 

[WaXmAn]

Ugh, with the new WIN 10 upgrade the in Windows Gamma setting for this PG278Q is not working any more.... gamma is now washed out....

 

[MaelstromOC]

You just need to reapply your calibration or create a new one. Mine is still just as it was once I reapplied my calibration files for my monitors.

 

[WaXmAn]

You just need to reapply your calibration or create a new one. Mine is still just as it was once I reapplied my calibration files for my monitors.

Found a ICC profile for this monitor online and it works!! I am all good again now. I used the manual windows Gamma slider which was missing in color management since upgrading WIN 10. This ICC works better now.