Dual Monitor Setup - HDMI Looks Horrible Compared to DVI

[Infinite]

Is there something I'm missing here? I have a dual monitor setup. One is connected via DVI, the other HDMI. The one on HDMI looks all washed out. I'm not sure what's going on here. They're both set at the same resolution and refresh rate.

If it helps, I have a Radeon HD 7950 and two BenQ GL2450 monitors.

I appreciate any help as I can't seem to figure this out even with the aid of Google. Sorry, I'm a noob with displays. I've never had a dual monitor setup before, much less one using two different inputs.

[Soylent_Merchant]

Make sure your graphics card is set to accept dual moniters. also the moniter should have a built in menu that will let you set the quality, it may have gotten turned own

[Maverick]

it might be a bad or low quality hdmi cable as the only difference between hdmi and dvi is hdmi handles both audio and video and dvi only handles video, but both are digital video cables.

[rotNdude]

Swap the monitors and see if the washed out look is still there. That way you can rule out one monitor versus the other.

[Infinite]

I previously had them set up with 2 DVI cables but I then purchased the 7950 as an upgrade. It's not the monitor itself. Is it possible there's a setting in the monitor that would fix this? Maybe the card thinks it's connected to a TV instead of my monitor?

[darkkterror]

I had a similar problem back when I had two monitors hooked up with DVI and HDMI. The colors on the HDMI one just didn't look the same.

What it ended up being for me was that HDMI seems to have 2 different color formats available (RGB and YCbCr). The HDMI connected monitor was defaulted to RGB. When I changed the color format to YCbCr (my nvidia control panel called it YCbCr444) then both monitors finally looked identical.

If this is the problem for you, you'll need to look for the setting somewhere in Catalyst Control Center. My nvidia control panel called the option "digital color format" and had the choice of RGB and YCbCr444. This option was only present on the HDMI connected display. The option did not appear for my DVI connected monitor.

[Infinite]

Yeah I played with all 4 available options but none seem to change anything. I currently have it set to YCbCr 4:4:4. I'm not sure that's the problem. If it is then I dunno why changing it doesn't seem to produce a difference. I've also heard of people "renaming" their input from TV to PC, but I can't find that anywhere. You know what they're talking about?

[GreyPilgrim3]

Originally posted by darkkterror:

I had a similar problem back when I had two monitors hooked up with DVI and HDMI. The colors on the HDMI one just didn't look the same.

What it ended up being for me was that HDMI seems to have 2 different color formats available (RGB and YCbCr). The HDMI connected monitor was defaulted to RGB. When I changed the color format to YCbCr (my nvidia control panel called it YCbCr444) then both monitors finally looked identical.

If this is the problem for you, you'll need to look for the setting somewhere in Catalyst Control Center. My nvidia control panel called the option "digital color format" and had the choice of RGB and YCbCr444. This option was only present on the HDMI connected display. The option did not appear for my DVI connected monitor.

Thank you so much for posting this. I was just able to fix an issue with a new dual monitor setup by going into the nvidia control panel and switching the hdmi monitor to YCbCr444.

[Infinite]

Originally posted by darkkterror:

I had a similar problem back when I had two monitors hooked up with DVI and HDMI. The colors on the HDMI one just didn't look the same.

What it ended up being for me was that HDMI seems to have 2 different color formats available (RGB and YCbCr). The HDMI connected monitor was defaulted to RGB. When I changed the color format to YCbCr (my nvidia control panel called it YCbCr444) then both monitors finally looked identical.

If this is the problem for you, you'll need to look for the setting somewhere in Catalyst Control Center. My nvidia control panel called the option "digital color format" and had the choice of RGB and YCbCr444. This option was only present on the HDMI connected display. The option did not appear for my DVI connected monitor.

So you have to find the settings for the individual monitor? I dunno how to do that. I thought control panel included everything. I'm sorry. I don't deal with this stuff ever and I've never had a multi-monitor setup in my entire life before.

[GC13]

Originally posted by JLH:

it might be a bad or low quality hdmi cable as the only difference between hdmi and dvi is hdmi handles both audio and video and dvi only handles video, but both are digital video cables.

Isn't HDMI an either/or thing? Either it's transmitting the video or it's not? When HDMI starts to fail, it doesn't wash the color out, the pixels it doesn't have simply fail to appear.

[tuxxor]

Originally posted by Infinite:

Yeah I played with all 4 available options but none seem to change anything

That's strange, because it surely looks like "Full RGB" / "Limited RGB" mismatch, i.e. when the monitor expects full range (0-255) but your card is outputting limited range (16-235), then you get dark/light gray instead of black/white, so everything looks washed out. Anyway, the manual for Benq G50/GL50 series suggests, that there is "HDMI RGB PC Range" option in advanced picture settings in the monitor OSD menu, try switching that option and see what happens.