Games misbehaving
Some games, such as certain Steam titles, will choose to completely ignore desktop colour data including any applied ICC profile. It might be tempting to ‘enforce’ the profile on games that don’t use the desktop settings. This can be done using a utility such as a DLL injector (ColourClutch), another enforcement utility or running in ‘borderless window’ mode. When enforcing a profile in this way you often end up with the games incorrectly transforming (or partially transforming) colour and gamma data. Games that disregard the desktop settings use a range of different baselines for colour and gamma information which differs from that of the Windows desktop environment. So even if the ICC profile is ‘enforced’ it won’t be doing what it should, basing its corrections off the desktop rather than game baseline. Such games are designed to work with the GPU’s default LUT and gamma configuration only and once you change this ‘logic’ all sorts of issues can occur. You can get some minor banding issues even if ICC profiles are used ‘properly’, but that doesn’t compare to the more noticeable issues that can occur if the profiles are enforced. Gamma issues, shade crushing, extensive banding, grey neutrality issues and incorrect colours are all quite common.

If you’re using a monitor with a good colour setup from the OSD there is really no need to apply an ICC profile for any game, but that can’t be said for all monitors unfortunately. There are plenty of games out there that will use the desktop colour settings as their baseline and can use at least some of the data contained in the ICC profiles. As noted earlier, this would exclude colour gamut transformations but can include gamma, colour temperature and colour channel rebalancing. On monitors where the image simply doesn’t look at all appealing after OSD adjustments alone, things can certainly look better once an ICC profile is used. Just be aware of those titles that seem reluctant to use ICC profiles and don’t be surprised if these games don’t quite look right if you enforce the profile.