interaction between calibrated ICC profiles & games

M

Momo

Gawd
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Mar 3, 2005
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Okay, so i'm a total display newbie i have to admit.

From doing a little searching around here, it sounds like many games out there ignore or over-ride your ICC profile when launched.

Can someone with more knowledge about this clarify?

Do they ognore the ICC profile completely, or do they try and 'enhance' it?

If my monitor's out of box setup is garbage (ie: way too bright, too much contrast, and too much Red lets say) ... and i launch a game that over-rides the ICC profile with it's own, or tries to enhance it's settings ... i'm still not getting what the game designed is shooting for, right? because my OOB setup was not a calibrated setup? They base their game-specific colour settings/icc profile/whatever they're forcing on a properly calibrated display i'd hope.

So, wouldn't it be beneficial for me, as a gamer, to calibrate my display with something like a Spyder4 Express, to get a relatively accurate starting point for the given games that i play to change the colors from? or is this defeated entirely by any game that enforces colour manipulation? (i dont know the correct term for what games like this do, sorry)

Once again, sorry for my newbishnes in this regard.

Thanks for any clarification you can provide, [H].
 
Games tend to ignore ".icc" profiles. There are some games like WoW that have an option to "use desktop gamma" which will at least use your video card control panel's calibration but, I'm not sure if it uses whatever ".icc" profile you have active.

It really doesn't matter what a game that ignores a calibration is trying to do because, the environment it was designed under will be different from the users. A game has no way to adjust to a display's actual calibration needs such as the ambient lighting conditions or that a display can have a gamma of 2.3, 2.6, or any random gamma point out of the box. IIRC, games basically switch to a generic PnP monitor ".icc" profile.

There is a way to get games to use a display's calibration but, I think you have to grab a program that allows/forces LUT loading which prevents a game from trying to load some random generic ".icc" profile.
 
games aren't color aware and will happily reset the video card lut and wreck calibration.

i use monitor calibration wizard, it sits in the system tray and actively enforces the calibration. it may not work correctly on a multi monitor system though.

make sure your calibrated monitor profile is active, install mcw, run (but don't click the 'run wizard button'), save the profile (mcw profiles aren't .icc profiles, they're just snapshots of the video card lut in mcw's own format), load the saved profile, check 'load at windows startup' and 'persistent profile', and you're done.
 
Do they ognore the ICC profile completely, or do they try and 'enhance' it?
Click to expand...
They ignore it. Even if you manage to reload the videocard LUT data (or use a hardwarecalibrated screen) no color space transformations will be carried out. Only way to accomplish this is a screen with color space emulation or at least an appropriate fixed mode.
 
I see I see. So monitor calibration is really only for desktop use, then. I see I see.

Or, rather, it's for non game use.
 
Yup, for non-game use. Games mostly set their own color space at their own whim.

Most games actually do look better with oversaturated color anyway, except the ones that go for undersaturation as a style. You know, the whole "ERMAGERD D3 HAZ 2 MUCH COLORS" debate.
 
lol, i only played d3 a bit. total waste of time imho.

Hadnt really thought the colours were that bad, but meh anyhow :)
 
no, if you have a calibrated monitor profile, you can still take advantage of the calibrated colors in games even though they ignore .icc profiles by using monitor calibration wizard. mcw captures and enforces the correction applied to the video card lut so that colors will look calibrated all the time. if a game tries to change or reset the lut, mcw changes it back.
 
Momo said:
I see I see. So monitor calibration is really only for desktop use, then. I see I see.

Or, rather, it's for non game use.
Click to expand...

You can still benefit from LUT changes, which are, IME, more substantial and important anyway. It is especially beneficial in dark games, where you can get much better shadow details.
 
Some games can use your calibration. If they have an option to use "Desktop gamma" or the like, or if you can run them in full screen windowed mode (where they are full screen, but actually running in a window surface). In those cases, they will use the calibrated gamma curves.

There is software, as people have suggested, another one that can help is Color Clutch it uses modified DirectX DLLs to intercept and modify the LUT settings.

There are also monitors with their own internal LUTs that you can calibrate that hold the calibration no matter what. However they are pricey.
 
Color Management is a very long and ultimately sad story with only one conclusion: if you need proper colors everywhere u will need expensive monitor with hardware calibration and there is no way around it :(

CM and ICCs are confusing and counter-intuitive at first and to keep it simple I will say this:
- changing 2D-LUT (gamma ramp) on digital connections like DVI, HDMI and DP suck because it gives banding that looks bad
- you cant correct for gamut errors in most applications and definitely not in games. And even if it works it introduces it's own banding
- games don't even work well with custom LUT and override it. There are tricks to keep 2D-LUT and Color Clutch is one of them

only reasons to use custom 2D-LUT are:
- you have very very bad default gamma ramp on LCD that looks so bad that banding from calibration looks better than this very bad gamma ramp
- when you use CRT as analog VGA output have 10bit so there won't be any visible banding and CRTs and on CRTs you can achieve much better blacks with calibration (lower "brightness" normally give black crush that you can eliminate with calibration giving you better blacks without black crush)

on other cases just give it up... it's not worth it :(
 
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