[tharkun__]

Well back when, literally 25 years ago, when it was all ATI, there were constant driver issues with ATI. I think it's a pretty well known thing. At least was back when.

I did think that given ATI was bought out by AMD and AMD itself is fine it should be OK. AMD always was. I've had systems with AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs back when it was an actual desktop tower gaming system I was building/upgrading myself. Heck my basement server is still an AMD CPU system with zero issues whatsoever. Of course it's got zero graphics duties.

On the laptop side, for a time I'd buy something with discrete Nvidia cards when I was still gaming more actively. But then life happened, so graphics was no longer important and I do keep my systems for a long time / buy non-latest gen. So by chance I've been with Intel for a long time and gaming came up again, casually. The Intel HD graphics were of course totally inadequate for any "real" current gaming. But I found that replaying some old favs and even "newer" games I had missed out on (new as in, playing a 2013 game for the very first time in 2023 type thing) was totally fine on an Intel iGPU.

So when I was getting to newer titles, the Intel HD graphics no longer cut it but I'm still not a "gamer" again, I looked at a more recent system and thought I'd be totally fine trying an AMD system. Exactly like another poster said, "post 2015 should be fine, right?! And then there's all this recent bad news about Intel, this is the time to switch!".

Still iGPU. I'm not going to shell out thousands of dollars here.

And then I get the system and I get into Windows and ... everything just looks way too bright, washed out, hard to look at. I doctored around, installed the latest AMD Adrenalin driver, played around with brightness, contract, HDR, color balance, tried to disable the Vari-Brightness I read was supposed to be the culprit etc. It does get worse once you get into a game. Like you're in Windows and it's bearable. Then you start a game and you might Alt-Tab back to do something and everything is just awfully weirdly bright and it doesn't go away when you shut down the game either.

I stuck with it and kept doctoring for over 6 months now.

I've had enough. I bought a new laptop, two generations behind with an Intel Iris Xe for the same amount of money as the ATI system. I open Windows and ... everything is entirely totally 150% fine, no need to adjust anything. It's comfortable, colors are fine, brightness and contrast are fine. And the performance is entirely adequately the same as with the AMD system. Again, still iGPU and that's fine and expected. It's the quality I'm concerned with, not the performance I'm paying for. I expect to be able to get proper quality software and hardware even if I pay for less performance than gamer kid me back when was willing to.

[wtallis]

> And then I get the system and I get into Windows and ... everything just looks way too bright, washed out, hard to look at.

I've seen OEMs do that to an Intel+NVIDIA laptop, too. Whatever you imagine AMD's software incompetence to be, PC OEMs are worse.

[tharkun__]

It's Lenovo. FWIW, one thing I really didn't like much either was that I found out that AMD really tries to hide what actual GPU is in there.

Everything just reports it as "with Radeon graphics", including benchmarking software, so it's almost impossible to find anything about it online.

The only thing I found helped was GPU-Z. Maybe it's just one of the known bad ones and everything else is fine and "I bought the one lemon from a prime steak company" but that doesn't change that my first experience with the lemon company turned prime steak company is ... another lemon ;)

It's a Lucienne C2 apparently. And again, performance wise, absolute exactly as I expected. Graphics quality and AMD software? Unfortunately exactly what I expected from ATI :(

And I'm not alone when I look online and what you find online is not just all Lenovo. So I do doubt it's that. All and I mean all my laptops I'm talking about here were Lenovos. Including when they were called IBM ThinkPads and just built by Lenovo ;)

[dharmab]

Laptops have really gone to hell in the past few years. IMO the only sane laptop choices remaining are Framework and Apple. Every other vendor is mess, especially when it comes to properly sleeping when closing the lid.

[badc0ffee]

I bought an AMD Ryzen Thinkpad late last year, and I had the same issue with bright/saturated colours. I fixed it by running X-Rite Color Assistant which was bundled with the laptop, and setting the profile to sRGB. I then turned up the brightness a little.

I think this a consequence of the laptop having HDR colour, and the vendor wanting to make it obvious. It's the blinding blue LED of the current day.

[tharkun__]

Yeah, I read HDR might be the issue. Didn't know X-Rite and did not come with the laptop, but did play with disabling / trying to adjust HDR, making sure sRGB was set etc. Did not help. Also ran all the calibrations I could find for gamma, brightness and contrast many many times to try and find something that was better.

What I settled on for quite some time was manually adjusted color balance and contrast and turning the brightness down. That made it bearable but especially right next to another system, it's just "off" and still washed out.

If this was HDR and one can't get rid of it, then yeah agreed, it's just bad. I'm actually surprised you'd turn the brightness up. That was one of the worst things to do, to have the brightness too high. Felt like it was burning my eyes.

[bavell]

So long story short...

You don't like current AMD systems because one of them had an HDR screen? Nothing to do with CPU/GPU/APU?

[tharkun__]

If the diagnosis is that AMD GPUs can't do HDR properly then yes. There was not a single setting anywhere in Windows itself nor the Adrenalin driver software that allowed me to configure the screen to a comfortable setting. Even when specifically trying to disable anything HDR related.

My work Macbook on the other hand has zero issues with HDR and its display.

To be fair, you can still blame the OEM of course but as a user I have no way to distinguish that, especially in my specific situation.

[badc0ffee]

I think I found X-Rite by just searching for color with the start menu.

Before I used that tool, I tried a few of the built-in colour profiles under the display settings, and that didn't help.

I had to turn the brightness up because when the display is in sRGB it gets dimmer. Everything is much more dim and muted, like a conventional laptop screen. But if I change it back to say, one of the DICOM profiles, then yeah, torch mode. (And if I turn the brightness down in that mode, bright colours are fine but dim colours are too dim and everything is still too saturated).