Staying on the serious side, it bugs me how many “hardcore gamer” spent a fortune on their setup and then just connect their monitor and be done with it. Even the best GPU and the highest settings can’t help you when the colors are completely blown-out due to the monitors stock settings. I particularly love how I often see Trackmania players that complain that a track is “too dark”, but it’s actually just their miscalibrated monitor.
Here’s what helped with my smasnug and the monitors of my friends:
Settings - Video - Custom - all sliders to middle/“normal” position (adjust brightness from OS)
If it has HDR and your system supports it, turn it the fuck on with EDID values and never off even when you never have HDR content and when said HDR content looks very SDR (unless screenshots are broken in HDR and you want to screenshot something of course) (and if you have a CD with the monitor with a color profile you better go use that of course lol)
Bug closed: Unable to reproduce. 2026-07-19 | 23:47:42
In all seriousness though, this is what the ‘Gamma’ setting on your monitor is for.
Staying on the serious side, it bugs me how many “hardcore gamer” spent a fortune on their setup and then just connect their monitor and be done with it. Even the best GPU and the highest settings can’t help you when the colors are completely blown-out due to the monitors stock settings. I particularly love how I often see Trackmania players that complain that a track is “too dark”, but it’s actually just their miscalibrated monitor.
/rant
It’s not even that hard to set up now days, every OS has a setting for it, even linux DEs
Here’s what helped with my smasnug and the monitors of my friends: