The last handful of games I played asked my to adjust my screen brightness (doing this for Detroit now). You have to turn it up or down until one symbol is barely visible and the other is invisible. The thing is, I always have to turn it all the way down. Is that normal? Is my eyesight too great for modern games? Or is my TV simply as bright as a miniature star?
@Octane I think it maybe to do with the fact that so many games these days are also HDR. HDR TV's also vary a LOT in terms of brightness and some games are built to accommodate up to 10000nit TV's (if/when they arrive) so its a way to calibrate the game to your TV so you get the 'best' HDR experience your TV can deliver. Games aren't like movies where they are mastered to fixed point - like 1000 or 4000nits but can be variable so you adjust the sliders to fit your TV.
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@Octane Yeah, I find that I have to crank the brightness way down too if I want to fit the recommendation of not seeing the one symbol. But I find in practice that when I do that, I don’t like how dark the in-game images are and I can’t appreciate the detail and graphics as well as if I leave the brightness up a couple notches. I’ve had my PS4 hooked up to 2 TVs and both are the same in that I prefer the image a little brighter than the game recommends.
My tv is not hdr. What i do is have 3 presets with brightness settings for tv and 2 for games. One game setting is normal with the second set brighter if i desire for dark locations or times of day. With my LG tv i use presets of 45 for normal and 90 for when i need to see in the dark. I rarely need the 90 setting.
I then adjust the game provided brightness setting to what i like for that game, and do not worry about what i am suppose to see. What would be nice is if we could see the game screen while we made the adjustments like with the tv settings.
@Th3solution Yeah, that's what I usually do as well. The game is way too dark if I play it on the recommended settings, but that's what they recommend me after all.
I always up the brightness because I think all game developers assume we game in pitch black with nothing but the screen to illuminate us all the time.
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i always ignore that particular suggestion, i'll have the brightness set to how i want it thank you
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What about the Limited/Full RGB option in PS4 screen settings? If I set it on Full, games looks better to me even if I have to set game brightness on 8/10 while I have to set it on 4/10 when on Limited...
@Octane@Th3solution Same; if I followed half the recommended brightness settings for individual games, I wouldn't be able to see a gosh-darn thing.
I did follow them once, but quickly found that I'd then have to spend the first five minutes of my exciting new game pausing and adjusting the brightness in the options (or quitting out to the main menu; some games don't let you tweak things on the fly, if you can believe that). Eventually, I simply booted up my favourite game, left it idle whilst in a relatively neutral environment, adjusted my television's brighteness settings and vowed to ignore the in-game brightness controls in future.
Newer televisions do have a wider array of settings to make things more complicated. Going back to my PS3 and PS2 now that I've got a 4K screen, things are darker than I used to have them, and I've started finding those in-game brightness sliders useful again, but it's a case-by-case basis.
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@RogerRoger I remember the time when you didn't have to worry about any of those settings. Just your TV and console, pop in a game and you were good to go!
@RogerRoger Yeah, games like Bloodborne, Batman Arkham series, The Order 1886, etc. - are super dark and yet so intricately detailed and beautiful. I want to be able to see the textures in the corners and in the distance. With the brightness cranked up a little bit, things ‘pop’ just a little bit better and more vividly sometimes.
A friend was telling me that if I get an OLED TV then I’ll be able to appreciate the color and dark/bright range better. For now I just have a piddly LCD 1080p.
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@Th3solution OLED comes with its own set of problems. I love the screen on my PS Vita (original OLED model) but doubt I'd ever go for a full-sized television; LED is fine for me, ta. Particularly since using OLED screens at high brightness levels for extended periods of time can dramatically shorten their lifespan, and patches of your screen will start to die.
It's a similar conversation to a recent one in the Movie Thread; things seem to be shot darker nowadays. Games, television shows and films all seem to take place at night. Those games you mention are prime examples and are all quite recent; even comparing Arkham Asylum to Arkham Knight, there's a huge difference in lighting and the resulting visible detail. Dynamic lighting is wonderful, but when there's a fallen spotlight in Tomb Raider (2013) you bet you can't see anything else in the room. I don't remember ever having to do that for a PSone game, or even a PS2 game, and increasingly, we all seem to be brightening our displays.
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@RogerRoger It irks me how dark a lot of games are now. I guess it's because of the more realistic lighting, but I sometimes can't see a thing. The only time it has been a real problem for me is last gen playing Grand Theft Auto 4. I had to turn the brightness on my TV up to max to see in some areas.
@mookysam If memory serves (since I never owned it, but did play a flatmate's copy on Xbox360 for a couple weeks), Grand Theft Auto 4 was one of the first games to really push for realistic lighting. It always had that slightly washed-out, grainy film look to it, especially at midday. The flipside was that when you subsequently went inside a building, they added a realistic effect where your eyes adjusted to being out of the light. Neat, but frustrating because now I can't remember what a single interior environment looked like.
Good call, though. I'd forgotten about that. Almost all of the examples I could think of are from this current generation, or have at least been remastered with new lighting (like Return to Arkham or L.A. Noire).
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@RogerRoger I think I remember MGS V had the cool effect of stepping out into the light and having the character’s eyes adjust to the bright sun. Or was that Uncharted 4? I don’t know, maybe both.
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@Th3solution I think it was both; especially in the more cinematic games of this generation, it's become quite a common effect. It's not so bad when you're stepping from darkness into light, but the other way around and I'll frequently get shot at by some goon I failed to notice!
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Topic: Screen Brightness
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