Massive artifacting issue with any dark areas on any image displayed on my desktop

Cyber Akuma

Cyber Akuma

Gawd
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Jan 3, 2009
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Massive artifacting issue with any dark areas on any image displayed on my desktop

My computer is an i7-3770K running two EVGA GTX 670 FTW cards in SLI and Windows 10.

I am not sure how long this has been going, but it appears to have started a few days ago as this is when I first noticed it. At first I assumed it was an issue of badly compressed video since I was watching livestreams at the time and thought the video was not being compressed well or my connection was being poor. But I have been noticing it more and more all over YouTube... and now finally after testing I realized that it's not even limited to video, on top of movies themselves also showing this issue, even still images show it.

I tried displaying those same videos and images on my laptop, and they looked fine there! But on my desktop anything with any dark gradients look horrific.

Here are two example images:

https://i.imgur.com/A3Ve2Vm.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/fJEqc4z.jpg

On my laptop, and for anyone else I asked to look at those links, they look fine.

But when I view them on my desktop... well, here's photos of that I took with my smartphone:

https://i.imgur.com/77zwrAv.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/NpUqM7N.jpg

I have no idea what is causing this. My video drivers haven't changed and I have disabled Automatic Updates in Windows 10 since I prefer to install them manually, so it couldn't have been a new driver or OS update.

I did install an app designed to trim MP4 files, but I uninstalled it, and it didn't seem to have modified my codecs... plus even if it did, that would not explain why even still images are displaying this issue, it would only occur in video.

It's driving me nuts how horrible everything looks on my desktop, especially since I watch a lot of streaming video on it. I have already tried resetting my Windows and Nvidia Control Panel settings to default, as well as updating my GPU drivers and even changing my refresh rate just to see if anything fixes it, and nothing.

To make sure it's my desktop and not my monitor, I also tried connecting my desktop by HDMI to my TV, as well as connecting my laptop by that same HDMI to my monitor and to my TV. The results were pretty conclusive, the image always showed the artifacting when displayed off my desktop, and didn't show artifacting when displaying off my laptop.

Any ideas where I can even begin trying to figure out what's wrong?
 
The first image you linked is a highly compressed jpeg, and if you were to open it in any image editing software, it actually looks like the garbled mess you're seeing on your screen. Most image compression algorithms (jpeg, h264, etc) devote bits to high frequency details (like edges) while throwing away low frequency information. Dark gradients, like the ones in your image, usually look terrible. I'm constantly annoyed by this on Netflix and other streaming services. Even their 4K streams don't have enough bit rate to preserve dark portions of the image without serious banding.

If you're seeing the banding on one screen but not another, it's down to the different gamma responses of the displays. For a high gamma display (darker image), you might not be able to see how bad the gradient really looks. On my calibrated CRT, that image looks pretty gnarly. I suspect the people you showed this to and who said it looked fine are viewing in bright conditions with a high gamma, or they just aren't as critical as we may be.
 
Ashun said:
If you're seeing the banding on one screen but not another, it's down to the different gamma responses of the displays. For a high gamma display (darker image), you might not be able to see how bad the gradient really looks. On my calibrated CRT, that image looks pretty gnarly. I suspect the people you showed this to and who said it looked fine are viewing in bright conditions with a high gamma, or they just aren't as critical as we may be.
Click to expand...

It's not the screen though, since when I connected my laptop to the same screen the artifacting didn't appear either, and when I connected my desktop to a different screen the artifacting was still there.
 
I took the image and adjusted levels in an image editor:

terrible_banding_sa866oxe3k.png


I'm not sure how to explain why you didn't see any artifacting/banding when you connected the display with your laptop, because that jpeg is pretty much 100% banding and artifacts.

http://web.comhem.se/zacabeb/repository/spectrum_rgb.png
Do you see any banding with that image?
 
Are you viewing these images in Chrome? Try going to chrome://flags/ and ctrl-f "force color profile." Change that to sRGB, and see if that helps.
 
Necere said:
Are you viewing these images in Chrome? Try going to chrome://flags/ and ctrl-f "force color profile." Change that to sRGB, and see if that helps.
Click to expand...

It's in anything. Web Browser, video player, image viewer, even my Blu-Ray playing software.
 
Cyber Akuma said:
It's in anything. Web Browser, video player, image viewer, even my Blu-Ray playing software.
Click to expand...
But did you try it? I had a similar issue recently in windows 10 and Chrome, and it turned out to be a color profile issue. Try changing your monitor to sRGB, too.
 
Necere said:
But did you try it? I had a similar issue recently in windows 10 and Chrome, and it turned out to be a color profile issue. Try changing your monitor to sRGB, too.
Click to expand...

How do I even do that? Change my monitor I mean.
 
I told you on Freenode to boot a Linux live disc and see if it was an OS-level problem. Did we do that?
 
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