[SOLVED] Are dark areas of games too dark a monitor's fault or games themselves?

[PakOne]

My monitor is the Acer Nitro XV273K which has an IPS panel and it's paired with an RTX 2080 Ti

My monitor's brightness, contrast and all settings are by default and the settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel too.

I have no HDR enabled

For surfing the web, watching videos and everything it's all perfect, I can see everything I should see in the dark areas and the brightness isn't too high or low either, it's nice.

For the majority of games I play it's ok too, everything looks good but when I play some singleplayer games which have a lot of dark scenes and elements I have to turn up the brightness, gamma, contrast and other settings and I can see what objects are in the dark areas but then the bright areas look too bright and it doesn't look good, it even hurts my eyes a little bit.

To this day I still don't know if this is a monitor/panel problem or a games problem.

Lots of games these days ask you to adjust the brightness setting when you launch them for the first time, and it works great for me in most cases but there are others which don't and these are the ones I have trouble with, they are usually only singleplayer games.

 

[USAFRet]

Some games, or parts of games, are indeed too dark.
Doom 3, for instance. Some scenes needed everything turned WAY up. Of course, that made the very next room too bright.

 

[Diddly]

you could try calibrating your monitor