sRGB emulation for Nvidia gpus with wide-gamut displays (novideo_srgb)

[trinibwoy]

This is great but wouldn’t it be easier to just get a monitor with a built in a RGB mode? I finally took the plunge on an ultrawide and went with Acer over Alienware because the Dell doesn’t support sRGB.

it’s really bizarre that Nvidia doesn’t support this natively. Does the AMD implementation also require an icc profile? How else would it know how to map to the monitor’s RGB space.

 

[Scott_Arm]

This is great but wouldn’t it be easier to just get a monitor with a built in a RGB mode? I finally took the plunge on an ultrawide and went with Acer over Alienware because the Dell doesn’t support sRGB.

it’s really bizarre that Nvidia doesn’t support this natively. Does the AMD implementation also require an icc profile? How else would it know how to map to the monitor’s RGB space.

Built-in sRGB modes can have their own issues. Some are good, some are not. Some of theme will have limitations like not being able to adjust brightness, which is stupid. Ultimately, for me, it comes down to being able to make a monitor work how I want it to. So now I have a 1440p 240Hz monitor with very fast response times that is also very well calibrated. This tool just lets you not have to make compromises by limiting your choice of hardware to the ones that have good srbg modes.

My understanding is the AMD drivers have an option to clamp the colour gamut and it does that just by reading the EDID from the monitor.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Tool is now at version 3.0. Supports dithering and a whole bunch of stuff.

https://github.com/ledoge/novideo_srgb

The recommendations for creating an icc have been updated as new versions have come out:

Notes for use with ICC profiles

• For the gamma options to work properly, the profile must report the display's black point accurately. DisplayCAL's default settings, e.g. with the sRGB preset, work fine.
• Since the color space conversion is done on the GPU side, the ICC profile must not be selected/loaded in Windows or any other application. If you want, you can do another profiling run on top of the active calibration and then use this profile in applications that support color management to achieve even better color accuracy.
• To achieve optimal results, consider creating a custom testchart in DisplayCAL with a high number of neutral (grayscale) patches. With those, a grayscale calibration (setting "Tone curve" to anything other than "As measured") should be unnecessary and might even be detrimental to the accuracy. The number of colored patches should not matter much. Additionally, configuring DisplayCAL to generate a "Curves + matrix" profile with "Black point compensation" disabled may also result in better accuracy than with an XYZ LUT profile.
• The option "Disable 8-bit color optimization" can be used to get better color accuracy in true 10-bit workflows at the cost of 8-bit accuracy. Only enable this if you really know you're working with 10-bit color.
• Only the VCGT (if present), TRC and PCS matrix parts of an ICC profile are used. If present, the A2B1 data is used to calculate (hopefully) higher quality TRC and PCS matrix values.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Ok, so it looks like Windows is FINALLY getting it's act together, but we'll see how it works. Haven't had time yet to read in detail, but there are implications for icc profiles. Sounds like apps can opt into auto colour management, which will ensure they're colour correct.

Advancing the State of Color Management in Windows - DirectX Developer Blog

Introducing Auto Color Management (ACM) – the power of Advanced Color on SDR (standard dynamic range) displays

devblogs.microsoft.com

Windows hardware display color calibration pipeline - Win32 apps

This topic covers display color calibration using a new GPU display color transform pipeline that's supported by Windows 10, version 2004 (20H1) and later.

learn.microsoft.com

Use DirectX with Advanced Color on high/standard dynamic range displays - Win32 apps

This topic shows how to use DirectX with Advanced Color scenarios—including high dynamic range, wide color gamut with automatic system color management, and high bit-depth.

learn.microsoft.com

novideo_srgb is still a great tool that allows all programs to be colour accurate and allows you to access dithering on 8bit panels with Nvidia gpus. It's now at version 4.0

GitHub - ledoge/novideo_srgb: Calibrate monitors to sRGB or other color spaces on NVIDIA GPUs, based on EDID data or ICC profiles

Calibrate monitors to sRGB or other color spaces on NVIDIA GPUs, based on EDID data or ICC profiles - ledoge/novideo_srgb

github.com

Edit: It sounds like you'll be able to calibrate your display to it's native gamut and auto colour management will automatically map the display output to the correct colour space. So if the application is expecting srgb and your display is wide gamut, then the output will be corrected so the displayed image won't be over saturated.

 

[Kaotik]

There's also easy to use Windows HDR Calibration tool now which creates ICC profile for you

The Windows HDR Calibration app is here

The wait for the Windows HDR Calibration app is over! If you're on Windows 11 and want to calibrate your HDR-capable device, you can now go to the Microsoft Store and download the app. 😊

devblogs.microsoft.com

 

[Scott_Arm]

I'm hoping some more details will come out soon so I can use my colorimeter to properly calibrate to my monitors native gamut and have srgb content displayed correctly. It would be cool to be able to use my monitor's 10bit capabilities without sacrificing the majority of content which is 8bit srgb.