screen gets extremely bright when exiting bs

[Simon Crane]

Hello, I have a weird problem, game works fine on my pc, no stutters or error messages or anything, just one extremely annoying issue:

when I exit my game, the screen gets extremely bright (as if overexposured in photoshop) and doesn't turn to it's normal settings in windows. I'm not sure if this is an issue with my videocard, or drivers or this game. I don't have it with any other game, it just happens occasionally with some games, but with bioshock it happens all the time.

With some other games when this happens, starting the game and exiting again most of the time solves this problem, but when it happens with bioshock, the only solution is to reboot my pc to get the default colours etc on my desktop. This can be very annoying as sometimes rebooting is not an option because I'm running some other program in the background or something.

The thing is, I have an extremely old and dark crt monitor. So I have to crank up the brightness and also gamma in every game almost to the max. Buying a new monitor is not an option, as I don't want to spend the money on it at this time. I'm saving to buy a very nice one at the end of the year.

So what could cause this and how can I solve it? A search didn't helpl and I went through all posts here to page 10 and didn't see anybody else reporting something like this.

Other specs:
Winxp, sp3 32 bit
p5q pro
3gb memory
quad core
evga gtx 275 ftw edition (overclocked factory settings)

everything is at normal specs, I haven't overclocked anything.

Any help is appreciated.

[headkase]

I own an Ati card and for that in this situation you would go to the color settings in its control panel and reactivate the color correction. Perhaps there is an equivalent in the nVidia control panel? Sorry, I can't say one exists or direct you to the setting as I have never owned nVidia hardware.

[Simon Crane]

Nope, I have already tried that. In nvidia settings, there is no toggle option, you can change brightness etc or return to default. Returning to default doesn't help, as everything still is totally too bright and oversaturated, I can set everything to very dark to compensate, but that makes the quality very bad, so, it becomes impossible to read text etc.

I am definitely no expert on this, but it could have something to do with the directx overlay or something, when entering the game, the system accesses the hardware in a different way, through directx; when exiting the game, it should return it to the 'desktop' settings, meaning that this is not just an issue with correcting the color and brightness etc in my nvidia color correction, but with an issue relating to the game not ending some threads as it should. Again, this is just conjecture, but it is a laymens best effort to describe what's going wrong, I hope.

[headkase]

Quake 3 used to do this to me and Ati's reactivating of the color controls would fix it. Sorry, I don't have anything else to suggest.