FSX night textures and LCD monitor, problem

[roger-wilco-66]

I have a Samsung Syncmaster BX2450L LED monitor, driven by a Nvidia 460 card over HDMI, and have a strange effect when flying at night.
It looks like the textures are reduced in their color to 256 or less, which looks plainly awful.
No problems in daytime though. It seems like this effect is tied to the depiction of very dark images.

Does that sound familiar to anyone?

Cheers,
Mark

[Roger]

Yes! I have a very similar monitor and video card and I never fly at night because ity looks so bad.

[roger-wilco-66]

I hope this can be solved.
I tried all the different modes of the monitor, to no avail.
I noticed that at night, if you have a decently lit house, for example, it's no problem. Only really dim colours wash out and the sim looks like a game from 1992.

3669336783

I hope it shows well enough. EDIT: it didn't, so I edited the image and made it a tad brighter. This is exactly what it looks like, except for a higher resolution (native 1080p in my case).

[Roger]

Same as I get...not found a solution unfortunately. Like you say it looks like it's configured to 256 colours.

[stansdds]

I hope this can be solved.
I tried all the different modes of the monitor, to no avail.
I noticed that at night, if you have a decently lit house, for example, it's no problem. Only really dim colours wash out and the sim looks like a game from 1992.

3669336783

I hope it shows well enough. EDIT: it didn't, so I edited the image and made it a tad brighter. This is exactly what it looks like, except for a higher resolution (native 1080p in my case).

Uhhhhh... I'm running a cheap Acer 22 inch LCD monitor and Nv 8800GT card. My night scenes don't look that bad! I've noticed a bit of "wavy" movements in the colors with this monitor, something my old 17 inch Samsung did not do, but during flight it's not even noticeable. Have you tried different drivers? Maybe it's the driver for the monitor?

[olaf1924]

I am using the same samsung moniter and I have the same night time problems. The video card I am using is a evga 8800gt. Dusk and dawn look great.

[Roger]

I am using the same samsung moniter and I have the same night time problems. The video card I am using is a evga 8800gt. Dusk and dawn look great.

Dusk and dawn do look great, but full night is cartoonish.

[stansdds]

Three people using different Nvidia cards, but the same monitor and getting the same problem. Sounds like a monitor issue or possibly the driver for the monitor. Which Nvidia graphics card driver version are each of you using?

[olaf1924]

Iam using evga driver 270.61. I would like to report that when I start a aircraft using cfs2 the engine smoke causes my display to flicker blue for a couple of seconds but fsx aircraft display fine.

[roger-wilco-66]

OK, seems like stansdds is right, it must have something to do with the LCD monitor.
It looks like the display is unable to graduate dark colors in small steps, which seems to be a general problem with twisted nematic LCDs. But the way it is displayed is simply not acceptable. The problem cannot be solved by adjusting the monitor with its countless options in the configuration menu, I think I tried every combination there. So it's either the monitor driver or the problem is "hard coded" in the monitor itself, which would be bad, or it's related to FSX.

I'll fire up Il2 tonight and go for a night flight to see if it's the same there, as well as test other software. But I think I did not notice that effect in other games - I played Gothic 4 for example, which has a lot of dark scenes and don't remember something bothersome there.

I'm determined to solve this, because I like night flying.

Cheers,
Mark

[grunau_baby]

It is a generally known monitor or better LCD problem. Some LCD Monitors cannot display dark color gradients propperly. I have the same issue with an LG product. As far as I know it´s a true hardware issue, so driver or vidcard tweaking will not improve this.

I really love nightflying, but since I got my recent Display I quit with it completely. I have the same effect with other software, like photoedit, vid-display, but not as bad as FSX!

Alex

[roger-wilco-66]

Just for the record: Il2 is just as bad as FSX.
I will look at the monitor driver now and / or contact the Samsung support.

Cheers,
Mark

[olderndirt]

My monitor's an ASUS 266 with a GTX460 card. Here's what I get after some enhancement. The plane's a separate layer. 37692