[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).