Nvidia 9600M and an overbright SL

... but apparently not an overbright user

I've just bought an HP dv7 Notebook PC with an Intel Core2 Duo CPU, P8400 @ 2.26GHz, 4GB RAM, running Vista Home Premium 32 bit. I chose this laptop because of the Nvidia 9600M GT card, which was the best I could afford in a laptop. As my desktop has Intel integrated graphics, I expected to be over-the-moon with an actual CARD.

SL now runs blisteringly fast on the Ultra settings with 256m draw distance, but everything is too bright, especially snow or anything with glow. It's dazzling, bleaching out most of the detail and looks far worse than my much-maligned Intel chipset.

I've gone into the Nvidia control panel and taken the desktop brightness and contrast settings down, played around with Gamma ... and all I manage to do is make my desktop too dark for everything else, without affecting SL at all. I'm sure I'm missing a simple setting somewhere that will fix this and I do see other people are running the same set-up without these problems so I'm sure it's me but I don't know what else to try

If anyone has any suggestions I'd really appreciate them.

Thanks,
Isobel

I have an 8600M on an HP laptop. It defaulted to High setting in the graphics Quality and Performance. I had to turn it down to the Mid setting to solve the problem of whites being so bright that all detail was lost.

Damien, do you mean in the SL Preferences? If so, did you leave the settings as the default Mid settings or were you able to customise them at all?

Many thanks for such a quick reply

Isobel

Yes the sl preferences. It defaulted to High but I had to turn it down to Mid.

I set mine with thae 8600M card in the GPU window not in SL do some color balancing it got mine to look darker like I like it.. ALSO if your used to running midday in SL all the time due to the intergrated card, you may find that midday is really bright now, Glow if used more than 0.010 is to much anywhere. I run in ultra custom.

another is check your lcd power settings as well. there may be a bug with the 9600 card but I don't think so you could check the Jira for to bright maybe

High preference setting:

Mid preference setting:

You could try turning off atmospheric shaders in graphics prefs (and make sure, under Hardware Options, that Gamma is zeroed). It sounds like it's just Windlight, to be honest. Here's a quick three-snapshot series I took of the mini-ice rink in our home. First pic is full Windlight with all shaders on, second pic has atmospheric shaders off (at which point you lose the Windlight clouds) and the third is with basic shaders off (at which point you're left with a pretty bland grey/blue sea and sky) -

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skelldagger/3161324272/