Svperstar on 18/2/2026 at 01:19
Quote Posted by Aja
Black crush still exists on OLEDs in a pitch dark room, at least on my Steam Deck. It's noticeable in Thief and not much else because most games aren't that dark. That being said, the overall effect of playing Thief on an OLED in terms of contrast and colour reproduction is closer to an old CRT than any LCD I've ever used. And at 90 FPS it has a lot less smearing. I think a high refresh rate OLED would be the last screen I'd ever need.
I'm not sure which OLED panels have the best feature set in 2026, or the Steam Decks in particular. When I got my OLED in Feb 2024 the 3rd gen QD-OLED from Samsung appeared to be the best so thats what I got.
I can see every single square in this test, and when playing Thief, Doom 3, and other black games I didn't notice anything wrong with the black levels, if it doesn't reproduce something right, I didn't see it:
[video=youtube_share;fv6T7aHsd54]https://youtu.be/fv6T7aHsd54?si=Zpy8VI37Jn4jjaas[/video]
Toutatis on 10/3/2026 at 19:54
I agree with you, Svperstar. I bought an ASUS XG32UCWG on sale last black friday, and I was instantly blown away. I will note the issues with text clarity and when I use auto HDR for games that don't officially support it there is some banding where it tries to squeeze out colours where none exist.
I just finished playing through Feast of Pilgrims and Violent End of Duncan Malveine, and I think this is one of the best purchases I could've made for Thieving in 2026!
I can see every one of those squares and the sun in streaming through the window.
Playing Kingdom Come Deliverance at 4K at 165hz is eye-meltingly gorgeous, and I can actually see at night without a torch, assuming there's some moonlight.
Svperstar on 10/3/2026 at 20:57
If you use Nvidia Inspector and turn RTX HDR debanding to low or off it will look better and run better, I'm replying on my phone but there are guides out there
mikjames on 11/3/2026 at 02:40
Why would you turn HDR off and expect it to look better? HDR is just adding more shades via interpolation, there should be no reason to disable it.
Unless you're a filthy purist who want's it to look closer to the stock graphics, but that doesn't mean it'll look better.
mikjames on 11/3/2026 at 02:46
Quote Posted by Aja
Black crush still exists on OLEDs in a pitch dark room, at least on my Steam Deck. It's noticeable in Thief and not much else because most games aren't that dark. That being said, the overall effect of playing Thief on an OLED in terms of contrast and colour reproduction is closer to an old CRT than any LCD I've ever used. And at 90 FPS it has a lot less smearing. I think a high refresh rate OLED would be the last screen I'd ever need.
It's not black crush in the traditional sense. The trouble is with SDR content the difference between Oled "off" and Oled level 1 black is astronomical, technically infinite.
CRT's never actually display a completely dark pixel like Oled's, because they are incapable of doing so when there is any other lit "pixel/phospor dot" being lit up on the tube.
The only solution is to calibrate min brightness to be slightly higher than "off", hdr processing can help, but it's not a perfect solution.
Perfect blacks are a lie, because the number of shades required to even get close to analog/crt near black would be wildly impractical, even hdr is maybe 1/10000th of the shades required.
You probably can't do this with the in game gamma slider, it won't prevent pixels shutting off with any accurate/pleasant gamma setting.
Go into the nvidia control panel and look for display/desktop color settings, and use the brightness slider there to calibrate a slightly higher min black level setting.
On steam deck you should be able to install an app to control brightness/black level in desktop mode. Perhaps LACT would do the job.
Niborius on 11/3/2026 at 14:57
I've been trying to do this recently to get the minimum black level to be a little higher because I was seeing some color banding in Thief in the extremely dark, near pitch-black areas, but to no avail. Perhaps I'll try again using the nvidia control panel like you mentioned although it didn't seem to help in my case because there was no setting for Min black levels, at least not that I could find. And I didn't know which slider was best to adjust in this case. Any help is welcome :)
I'm playing without HDR atm as I found it to be too much of a hassle and I couldn't get it to look right for some games. I tried both Window's AutoHDR and Nvidia's Reflex HDR (I think it is called). I couldn't tell if it looked better than having HDR off completely.
Quote Posted by Svperstar
If you use Nvidia Inspector and turn RTX HDR debanding to low or off it will look better and run better, I'm replying on my phone but there are guides out there
This is interesting, I'll see if I can make this work.
I just hope I'm not going to have to calibrate every game because so far with HDR that seemed to be the case where some games would just not look right on default settings
mikjames on 11/3/2026 at 21:37
In the Nvidia control panel the setting you want is just called "brightness".
Alternatively you can install reshade and use the Quint Lightroom shader to access a ton more options to control black level.
Svperstar on 8/4/2026 at 02:42
Quote Posted by mikjames
Why would you turn HDR off and expect it to look better?
I said turn RTX HDR debanding to low, not HDR. Thief has no native HDR support so you need to use either RTX HDR or another program to add HDR. RTX HDR works well enough for me, but the default debanding can remove some details. There are posts about this on Nvidia forums.
Bikerdude on 10/4/2026 at 07:56
"MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36"
5th gen OLED, Vera Noice... this panel has an RGB stripe subpixel layout os text and gui elements in Windows/Linux desktop will nice and sharp also.
(
https://www.msi.com/Monitor/MPG-341CQR-QD-OLED-X36) https://www.msi.com/Monitor/MPG-341CQR-QD-OLED-X36
Would love one of these, but its a tad expensive at £1000 atm in the UK.
vurt on 10/4/2026 at 16:10
I have a long fiber optic HDMI cable connected to my 77" LG C5, looks really good. Hell, if you can get an older OLED TV for cheap its worth it too.. i still have my older 55" OLED (also LG), from 2017, even to this date its just miles ahead of anything non OLED that i have. But yes that one has burns-ins, though of course not always visible, on a yellow background its visible.
I also have a 4:3 NEC 21" CRT for retro-games, can be really nice sometimes. Space is the main issue for these..
