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The state the computing world is in at the moment is atrocious.
Yesterday, I got the brilliant idea to uprade my graphics card drivers, because after a major OS update such as the Windows Creators Update, that's mostly a good idea. nVidia actually has a new driver online already, for 'early adopters of the WCU.'
So I update both the nVidia and Intel drivers on my workstation laptop.... and something changed. The screen was too dark. Went looking into the Intel settings (which control appearance on this laptop), and.... the gamma slider in the driver is gone.
So I do research:
The 15.40 series (up until November 2016) has a Gamma slider.
The 15.45 series (starting from December 2016) lacks it.
Some dud on the Intel forum says: "Gamma correction is now part of Windows 10," so I try that... but it was as I feared already, with all non-driverbased gamma tools. It works, but if you load a program that directly interfaces with the graphics card, the setting is lost. It has been a problem with LUT-loaders since forever.
The Intel driver just applies the gamma correction to everything going through it, so it doesn't have this problem. (Even if the software is run by the nVidia graphics card, the result is still put through the Intel chip, which then controls appearance and color.)
I need this function, because my laptop's screen is too dark for my taste. In some games, there isn't a gamma slider (or even brightness/contrast), and they become unplayable. On the Lagom Black Level Test, the first patch I can see is 7. By increasing gamma a bit, I can now see all of them. (I prefer that, even if the setting is possibly a bit too high, because this laptop isn't used for color critical work.)
So, I found the last version of the 15.40 driver, which, incidentally, was the one I downloaded from the DELL website some time ago. It's even newer than the one Intel provides, but it's gone now, at Dell, replaced with a driver from the 15.45 series.
Another driver / piece of software that I have to archive and hope keeps working, or I'll lose even *more* functionality in my computers. Maybe it's indeed best to switch to Linux, cut Windows off from the internet to prevent it updating and use it for gaming only, and make an image before I update anything by hand.
I feel as if I'm back in 2001 again, trying to balance BIOS updates, VIA drivers, and Soundblaster Live! drivers, to get my Soundblaster Live running without it corrupting my hard drive.
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