So, due to my lack of a tv of my own, for the past few months now I've been running my PS4 through an HDMI In port on my laptop. It works pretty well. I can't get any sound through my speakers, but I prefer to plug my headphones into the controller and get audio that way, so no big loss. I've been using this setup for a few months now, no issues.

Now, though, I've noticed an issue when I play Bloodborne, and I suspect I just hadn't noticed it in other games. Basically, there's a weird issue with displaying gradients. I think that's what you'd call them, basically anytime a flat colour or texture gradually changes in hue or brightness from one area of the image to the next. The best example I can give is in the hunter's dream in Bloodborne when you look at the sky. As the colour of the sky changes as it gets farther and farther from the moon, I get these lines at regular intervals, seemingly marking the change in colour.

The other place I can notice it, and this is harder to describe so bear with me, is in the opening cutscene, when the light shines directly behind the friendly doctors head. The light effect around his head has a similar gradient issue, and it matches the outline of his head as it moves outward, effective making several larger outlines of his head.

A similar issue, which I had noticed earlier in Metro Redux, and now only in the cutscenes of Bloodborne, is that shadows and dark areas aren't black, but a weird inky grey that shifts constantly and just plain looks unnatural. I figure it's related to the previous issue.

When I do hook my PS4 up to another display, for example an lcd tv, I don't get these issues, so it can't be a problem with the HDMI cable or the PS4. I also don't get these issues when using my laptop normally as a computer, so videos of the above examples in Bloodborne look perfectly fine, and any game I play on PC looks perfectly fine. It's something that only happens between the PS4 and the laptop.

I have tried switching back and forth from the integrated gpu, with no effect, as well as playing with the windows display settings. I also tried switching the color mode of the PS4, to no avail.

Anyone have any ideas how to fix this? I'd love to provide screenshots, but I frankly have no idea how to do so given the setup I'm using. I apologize if my wordy descriptions are hard to understand.

EDIT: I have been informed that the issue is called colour banding and not whatever nonsense descriptions I used in the original post.

Go into your PS4's video settings and try changing RGB Output to Full or Limited. It is probably on Automatic. That may help.

That sounds like color banding! I would imagine it is purely a result of whatever is translating your HDMI input to the laptop's display; I didn't even know you could do that, so I would expect that to be the culprit. How exactly are you doing this thing? Is there some software that does it? I would speculate it's a software problem, since you've ruled out just about everything else and color banding is not an uncommon issue.

Sorry for my lack of help or expertise, but my hat's off to you for doing that crazy thing. I super want to try it now.

[Edit]: If it's a software solution, is there a way to run it windowed instead of fullscreen? I'm curious if it has the same problems in both modes.

@mb: Tried that, didn't help much. It made dark corners look better, but I suspect it's because it just gave me crushed blacks.

Wow, all my internet searching with vague terms and I couldn't find out that it's called colour banding. Thanks! Now I can put a name to the issue.

To answer your question about how I'm doing it, I have no idea. I plug in the ps4, I turn it on, and the computer automatically switches to the PS4 display. I can switch between a computer diplay and the HDMI input by pressing FN + F8. It's an Alienware M17x R3, so it may be some built in functionality.

@brackstone: That's incredible. I poked around a bit and it seems like a feature specific to the M17x; I saw some suggestions for other issues with the HDMI port solved by updating to the latest GPU drivers, but you may well have already tried that. I'm sorry I don't have anything more helpful to add, I'm still kind of awestruck that they put in such a niche but incredibly useful thing into that laptop. I have a good-for-nothing M11x R3, and am incredibly jealous.

The only other thing I could suggest is looking around for the screen's calibration settings...I have to imagine it would be somewhere in the driver utility (the NVidia Control Panel or Catalyst Control Center or whatever), but I can't tell for certain. Sometimes tweaking the contrast/sharpness/etc of a screen can help with display inaccuracies. If you can find those settings, popping in a Pixar DVD could help you tweak it properly (they usually include a screen calibration utility). Alternately, there are various web pages you could go to on your laptop or the PS4 browser to help you modify stuff.

Obviously that's all dependent on those settings even exiting; my TVs and Monitors have buttons and menus dedicated to that, but I've never seen them on a laptop. Good luck! Display issues like that are really annoying, and I hope you can figure it out.

[moar edit]: I found a page that might help with your not getting audio from the HDMI. You mentioned preferring the controller audio, but hey, options are nice.

@thebrainninja: Thanks man, I'll try messing around with catalyst control center, see if that helps at all. I have to be careful though, since the display is fine in literally every other situation. Updating the GPU is a weird thing. Since the system uses switchable graphics, I've had to use modded drivers off leshcatlabs.net, the official ones have always been either way too old or not worked at all. So my drivers are roughly up to date (a few months old) in an unofficial sort of way. It could be that these drivers are causing the problem though.

Even if I can't end up getting this to work and I end up hooking up the PS4 to a tv, I can't really see a difference when watching movies, so the functionality is still handy for plugging in a blu-ray player. I guess I sort of took it for granted if this kind of feature is actually pretty rare.