I love Steam and Valve. The sales are great and Valve games are fantastic. I was surprised and giddy when I saw Portal2 for PC on sale at GameStop so I picked it up. I came home, installed it and fired it up. I noticed the game was very dark. I turned up the brightness settings however the game was still VERY dark. I opened my display settings through my desktop and adjusted my gamma, maxed it out and went back to Portal2. No change. I opened my Nvidia control panel and adjusted the brightness and gamma settings there too. They also had no effect on my game.

I noticed many of my Steam games stay dark. I can tell quickly which ones I wont be able to fix by opening the overlay. The windows in the overlay are black instead of the normal black to gray fade. This is a recent issue. I've changed nothing on my system and this affects all of my valve games plus Fallout New Vegas.

My video card is a GTS-250, I'm using an old CRT monitor (Monitor settings are maxxed as well). Hopefully some of you tech savie forumites can help me out here. I'm stumped.

I Googled your issue, because I've heard of this happening before, and here's a similar situation: http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=584673

So basically make sure your drivers are all up to date. If they are uninstall, reinstall them, and see if that helps.

Did you try to Verify integrity of game cache ?

I hate Steam. <_<

Jerhicco doesn't. He does want some help solving a problem, though .



Sorry, but I don't have anything useful to add :hehe:.

You're right. I love Steam.

Anyways, through the massive inter-webz, I found a work around. Seems to be an issue with Nvidia and Windows 7 not playing nicely together and preventing background gamma from affecting games.