I know it's a general forums section but while my question is technical it is also very generic and not related entirely to GOG, so decided this place is best anyway.

This past month I had been playing Dracula games on GOG and I had noticed that the games were noticeably darker than what I remembered. Some areas were nearly pitch-black, especially in Dracula 2. I ended up using dgvoodoo 2 wrapper to brighten my games otherwise I was completely unable to finish them. That being said I just thought I remembed them incorrectly or sth.

Recently I returned to my parents' house for All Souls' Day and I turned on Scratches (a Steam game) on my older laptop, which looked okay there. But today I returned to my own flat and I was shocked to find out just how much darker Scratches is on my other laptop. Nearly unplayable!

The older laptop is an Acer Aspire v5-573G with Windows 10 and GeForce 860M GPU. The newer one is Lenovo Legion 5 15ACH6H with Windows 11 and GeForce RTX 3070.

So far I have noticed this issue on Scratches from Steam and on Dracula 1-3 from GOG. I assume all other games running on those engines will have same issue.

I am wondering now if anyone else has also noticed that some older games (2D/2.5D games?) are sooo dark on more modern hardware? Or is it just me?

EDIT: Now I actually think it might be a resolution issue... Some games that use small resolutions are extremely dark, while those with higher resolutions look okay... Idk what is this

The difference is most likely caused by display technology. The screen where the game appears darker, is it an IPS or OLED by chance? And the screen at your parents' is a TN?

TN displays still have one massive advantage. You can see darker areas in games even with minimal brightness. Any of the more "modern" panels might not have gamma shift, but they also require the display's brightness to be set eye searingly high to have darker images look like they are supposed to. The main reason I'm still on a TN display.

Either way, the first order of business should be for you to check what technology the displays in question use. If they are both the same, then you can investigate further.

Believe it or not games that use DOSbox, are actually brighter and wash out, compared to true original DOS systems.

Plus new screens no longer have pixels the same as the old machines had. Technology changes can lead to off looking anomalies.

Darker? No. Typically CRT screens were darker due to their shadowmask tech.

As for the matter of what you're experiencing, tis could be as simple as the 3D games of the day no longer working optimally due to the lacking of technology they once used or a really bad scaling method.

Oh, and those awful passive matrixes, as mentioned, were famously washed out.

One more possibility: The color calibration of the display sucks. That's a bit harder to fix.

Sometimes some old 3D games can appear darker due to using a different renderer. Eg, Deus Ex can look objectively darker using DX10 renderer than original DX7 / OpenGL. However there's a setting that can revert that (edit \System\deusex.ini file in the game folder and enter the line "Classic Lighting=True" under the relevant renderer). I can't say I've noticed any difference for 2D / DOS games. For DOS games, maybe you could try experimenting with the DOSBox renderer settings (surface vs overlay vs ddraw vs opengl, etc) and see if that makes any difference. I'm sure CRT vs TFT differences plays a part too in terms of perceived brightness / gamma / contrast ratio.

Edit: Just noticed you're using a laptop. Another thing to be aware of there is that backlighting especially in older laptops can appear overly-bright. Go back far enough and they'll be using CCFL tubes vs LED for the screen backlights. We had an old cheap HP laptop where everything looked fine with a white background (working in Windows, Office, etc) but every "dark" game like Thief just looked washed out no matter what the screen brightness / gamma setting was set to.

If you're comparing two different computers, there may be different screen settings and/or simply different screens, with varying brightness and contrast... and light bleeding. And there may also be a question of the location, how bright the room is, whether sources of light are directed towards the screen...

But if you can confirm what you say at the end, that games with lower resolutions are darker and those with higher ones seem fine, then it may have to do with how a computer deals with resizing?

Considering the amount of bleeding this old monitor of mine has, I'm thinking that everything would appear dark when/if I'll change it... At the same time, if I'd compare with memories from way back in the late 90s when I had one that was fading and everything was really dark, it'll all appear awfully bright... And everything did once I changed it. Recall that I was poking around in RPG Maker at the time and when I wanted a fade to black between scenes I'd set the brightness to 30, it looked pitch black to me, and after changing the monitor that looked like... late evening or so, so had to go back and change it all to zero.

Sorry for responding so late!

I have checked with a few other games and I think I have managed to find out the reason why my games are so dark.

It's because of my second display AND resolutions.

When I play a game on my second display (BenQ ZOWIE RL2755) that has resolution smaller than 1176x664, the entire image turns significantly darker.

I have checked this on games that allow easy resolution change and in Tomb Raider the Angel of Darkness it is clear that the moment resolution gets lower than 1176x664, it gets dark.

On my primary display there is no visible change in graphics from what I could tell. So I think it's either an issue with the monitor itself, or the way NVIDIA sends image to the external display.

Unfortunately I still don't know how to solve that problem. When I change resolution in Windows settings, the desktop itself looks fine. It's only the games that turn darker. No idea how to tackle that.

BENQ is LED, TN with matte screen.

EDIT: Oh my God guys I think I found it and I think you will absolutely hate me for this! I have checked my display settings and I think the option that was causing it was HDMI RGB PC Range. If it's set to RGB(16~235) it gives a bit more pop to the screen with bigger contrast, BUT while it gives only a subtle contrast difference on high resolutions, it makes games extremely dark with flat blackness on smaller resolutions!
I think that's the issue that was making me so confused about the color differences. Not NVIDIA, not old games, but monitor's COLOR RANGE!

The monitor in question does seem to be loaded with a lot of the "gaming" gimmicks functions, special modes and whatnot that usually just end up screwing with the colors in some artificial way. OSD settings should always be the first thing to check if you experience something weird. If you were running it in the limited gamut range (16-235), no wonder darker games were basically black. Funny the monitor even offers that, but that's probably because it was meant mainly as a console gaming display.

Yeah I think that's exactly why my display looked so off. I have to admit I am still yet to understand the more modern monitors as before that I just used a very old LCD screen Hanns.G and before that CRT screens only.

At the moment I have set HDMI RGB PC Range in display settings to 0-255 but the colors turned out extremely washed out. Because of that I also used NVIDIA Control Panel to force NVIDIA color settings for this particular display in the "change resolution tab" (do you think this is the correct way to tackle this?). Now I get same brightness and color for all resolutions and games.

Thank you so much for your help!