Color Accuracy Mode

With the newer 460.89 and 460.79 drivers for Nvidia, there is now a new option under the "Adjust Desktop Color Settings" tab in the NVCP called "Color Accuracy Mode".

The description we have for this is:

This new setting still leaves me with some questions, even after reading the description. Some of these questions are:

1. Would checking the box to "Override to Reference Mode" be the behavior which occured previously? or was the behavior prior to the drivers to use "Accurate Mode"?
   
   
2. Could using "Accurate Mode" add any delay or change in input latency in any game? Would they ever affect some things like recoil or spray patterns in shooting games?
   
   
3. Clearly you would not be using the ICC profile if you click "Override to Reference Mode", but would this actually have any noticeable or negative impact when using a monitor which includes a driver that installs an ICC profile? Are the ICC profiles necessary at all?

 

The behavior previously was Reference mode, nvidia did little if any LUT modification and sent the image as is to the display.

No.

ICC profiles are still loaded by applications that wish to use them and affect processing of images even with Reference set.

 

I wouldn't sweat it unless you have a meter to create your own icc/lut.

Reference will give you less color conversions, if it's working as intended.

 

When I installed the driver, it was on accurate mode, then I clicked on "Override to reference" just to test and when I disabled it now I'm stuck on "Enhanced" and can't set "Accurate" anymore. Oh well.

 

Does this improve ICC profiles working better or not?
I gave up on ICC profiles a while ago and instead have just calibrated my displays the best they could be without them when using my meter. I know you can use Reshade but I don't want to always use that in every game and DisplayCAL Loader seems hit and miss with some games that I got kind of tired of creating exceptions all the time heh. It's too bad there isn't an option here to limit the color gamut to specific color spaces when using a wide gamut monitor.

 

yea... would be good to know which mode would be the best looking for TFT, IPS etc, HDMI vs DisplayPort

 

You probably modified one of the nvidia color,contrast,etc settings. Try resetting to default if it's an option.

There won't really be a universal "best". It'll be dependant upon you testing each input with a meter then calibrating your display and/or icc profile to that particular input.

I think "reference" is supposed to simply bypass any and all icc/lut activity even in true fullscreen apps, that is if it is working as intended/described.




For best results and if you have a meter I would recommend setting it to reference, calibrating what you can on the displays CMS then creating an icc profile on top of that. Accurate mode would purportedly then apply the remaining corrections from the icc to everything including games without the need for reshade even in fullscreen. Again, this is if these options are functioning as their descriptions suggest and a few user reports of them working in fullscreen.

 

I've posted about this in the last couple of driver upload threads, but I believe there's a bug in the CP implementation in that once accurate mode switches to enhanced, it will never switch back to accurate. I've tried resetting defaults, reinstalling the icc profiles, and even installing updated drivers, and it never goes back to accurate. I'm sure it's just a matter of the logic code being missing to make it change back from enhanced. It does not appear to be a functional problem so not a big deal really, just an annoyance that we'll have to live with until someone at Nvidia catches the error and fixes it.

p.s. I did look to see if there is a value for this set in the registry, but I didn't find one in any place obvious.

 

Indeed there is.

though enhanced is just accurate+sliders anyway.

 

Could anybody wrap up what now works that didn't work before? I suppose this has nothing todo with gamut mapping, i.e. 3D LUT? And gamma ramps precision/dithering is still wrecked by display/system sleep or intermittently?

 

Curious as to why you would say it wouldn't if Reference mode is the graphics driver or OS not altering any color properties in the GPU pipeline, whereas Accurate or Enhanced mode does.

Usually in electronics, the less conversion, the less delay there will be.

 

I'm not an expert, but i would guess there is a default LUT that Accurate/Enhanced make changes to. So Reference doesn't eliminate that step in the pipeline, it just prevents using a modified version of it that would alter how things look.

That being said, things seem smoother/crisper for me in Reference mode, but it's probably just placebo.

 

it may not be, accurate could be involving the windows colour profile (icc) in some way, and at times the ones shipped with a monitor are not actually good for that monitor, the one shipped with several benqs from 200x were too dark when applications and games actually used them and this could affect the way you perceptive text.

You can see what i mean with the windows colour calibration when adjusted wrong, text can stand out less.

 

never.

 

It is already enabled by default when 10bpc is selected. Which of course is totally dumb if you claim to be "dithering sensitive" like Astyanax, as DWM windowed content is always 8 bit and thus dithering as noticeable as if 8bpc were selected.

 

How do you enable/force dithering? Does it work properly on old 1080p 8bit monitor?

 

Registry or CalibrationTools:
https://hub.displaycal.net/forums/topic/how-to-enable-dithering-on-nvidia-geforce-with-windows-os/
https://bitbucket.org/CalibrationTools/calibration-tools/downloads/

There shouldn't be differences between different displays, apart from their general quality. Color precision for 1D LUT via gamma ramps is very unreliable on Windows though (same with AMD, to be fair). It's utter garbage vs. Linux, I've never seen broken gradients there with 1D LUT applied via gamma ramps...

 

the problem is, registry tweak is for older Windows versions and the tool doesn't do anything for me

 

I successfully used the reg tweak with Win 10 2004 and a GTX 1070.
Though, like I said, it's completely unreliable on Windows. Sometimes I even don't have smooth gradients with AMD after a regular system restart and then I need to restart once or even twice to fix it.
Try setting display resolution/bpc settings to custom instead of auto in the Nvidia control panel and then restart. It might help...

 

It tells me now I don't have permission to make changes in registry even when I try to make them as administrator. Moreover I have no idea which string to chose as my monitor, I got only one but at least few different monitor strings... and not sure which dithering mode works best with nvidia gtx 1060.