directx in black & white

[Guest]

When I run any program that uses DirectX 3D, the image is black & white
(actually more like brown and tan). This includes the 3D test in dxdiag -- I
see the spinning cube, but it's brown/tan (no green 'X'). Games that can run
using OpenGL work fine. The same game using DirectX is brown/tan.

I recently bought a PC with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card (128 mb),
running XP Pro with SP2, and DirectX 9.0c.

I've tried different monitors, resolutions, acceleration settings. I've
tried reinstalling DirectX, but it just says everythings current. So far as
I know, you can't uninstall it to do a clean reinstall.

Any ideas?

 

[Yves Leclerc]

Loss of color:
- Bad monitor cable connection or bad monitor
- Incorrect or bad video card drivers
- Missing or incomplete installation of motherboard
drivers
- Incorrect adjustments of monitor controls (on the
monitor itself)
- Bad video card (hardware is defective)

 

[Guest]

Yves - Thanks for the suggestion, but I must not have made myself clear in
the original post: both monitors I tried are fine in all cases _except_
full-screen DirectX Direct3D mode. When running a program that can use
either DirectX or OpenGL, in OpenGL mode it's fine (full color, no problems)
but in DirectX mode it's brown/tan. I can pause that program, alt-tab to the
desktop or any other application, and the image is fine, until I alt-tab back
to the fullscreen DirectX Direct3D image, and it's brown/tan again.

 

[Guest]

PROBLEM SOLVED
It was a setting in the ATI driver:
Display
Properties\Settings\Advanced\3D\DirectX\Custom\SMARTSHADER(tm)Effects\Classic
which results in a sepia-toned black & white image whenever Direct3D is
generating the image. The documentation doesn't offer any explanation of the
different effects--I thought it was some type of anti-aliasing or smoothing
until I discovered this by trial & error.
Selecting 'No Effect' solves the problem--the Diret3D image is identical to
the OpenGL image.