A few days ago, I was playing Bioshock and it crashed, and after that it seems like the lighting in my games is all screwed up, worst of all in Bioshock, but it impacts other games as well so it's a general issue. The issue is that lights are generally very bright, and extremely hazy and shimmery. Most lights, and in most games. Just very annoying and distracting. The lights also make cross-hatches. Staring at lights in the ceiling from far away look like a giant yellow or white X in Bioshock. In other games lights in the ceiling look like a big hazy circle, the circle getting bigger the further you get away from the light. My guns also have this strange glow, almost constantly, unless I'm in darkness.The only way I can tone it down at all in Bioshock is to turn off high-level post-processing. But I played almost through the entirety of Bioshock with post-processing enabled and it worked and looked flawlessly, up until that crash. I also run everything else at max. It almost seems like ever since that crash, my video card is forcing HDR/bloom effects on almost every light it processes, or something. I've pretty much tried everything except formatting my comp, which I really don't want to do.
It even impacts pictures and videos, not just games! If I go look at an image of Bioshock on the net somewhere, or a video of it, I'll tend to get that same annoying overly shimmery/hazy lighting that I do in the game itself. So maybe it's my monitor? Although, it's not to the same extent. It's far worse in the actual games. I've tried switching to Analog with my monitor, but there was no difference.
I tried reinstalling Bioshock itself, different forceware drivers, monitor drivers, ini settings, forceware settings, etc, but to no avail. Ever hear of something like this happening? It's driving me insane. Running an 8800 GTX + Vista, and I'm 100% sure that all of this started happening right after that Bioshock crash (the only Bioshock crash I've had), since I noticed this problem and started trying to fix it right after. I'm worried it might be an issue with my card itself, and I really hope not, since it's new and it was expensive. Thanks for any help that can be offered.
