Fix Oculus Rift Washed Out Colors on Nvidia Graphics Card

Earlier today I installed the newest driver update for my Nvidia 2080 Ti. Not long after, I decided it was time to play some Skyrim VR. When I slid the headset down over my face, I was concerned to see that the colors were off.

Everything was dull and washed out, like the contrast was turned down too low. I’ve run into similar issues with HDMI only monitors before with this GPU. TV screens typically operated with at limited color range. Nvidia GPUs tend to detect everything that connects via HDMI as a television and restrict the colors that are rendered on the display.

There’s a setting in the Nvidia control panel that will allow you to force a full color spectrum on an HDMI connected device. Seems simple, we’ll just open the control panel and, oh no the Oculus does not show up as a display. to apply the setting to. Now what?

There are all kinds of methods to deal with this issue posted on-line. One of the more common is to get a HDMI display and connect it to the same port you use to connect your Oculus. Then use the control panel to force the color setting. The idea is that setting will stick on that port. Personally I was not able to get this method to work. Every time I plugged in my headset the setting was changed back to restricted.

In the end, I found that some kindly sole has written a utility that searches through your registry and sets all of the HDMI devices to full color. It worked perfectly for me and the next time I update my driver, I’ll just need to run it again. You can download the Nvidia Full Color Toggle utility here. Keep in mind downloading and running anything off the Internet can be dangerous and that you are doing so at your own risk.