when I was younger I thought the HDR in HL2's episodes was just a fun little detail to represent Gordon's eyes adjusting, and had no idea it was a side effect of an actual proper graphics-related feature

You know it's gonna be a good video when Philip starts it with caboosing

When Windows 11 first launched, I was under the impression that Auto HDR would be a feature that turned on HDR on your monitor when a HDR source like a game was running and back to SDR when viewing SDR content. Imagine my surprise when I found out what it actually does.

I get the impression at times that not even game devs understand HDR. Seeing only a brightness slider in the HDR settings is deeply concerning.

Despite the Source Engine's HDR being fake, using a simulation of the player's eyes adjusting to differing light levels is actually a really clever way of replicating HDR in the context of a video game.

Doom Eternal was the first game I played when I got my new OLED monitor, and I was blown away. Unfortunately, it set up unreal expectations for me for the future.

trying to actually get a HDR video rendered in the correct format is just a nightmare on its own - I've had to upload my KZfaq videos directly and use the built-in KZfaq editor to trim it lately, otherwise nobody can watch my greyed-out video!

Ori and the will of the wisps is probably the best example of HDR implementation. It looks amazing and the contrast between the bright areas and the dark areas really makes the image pop

It's probably worth mentioning that the 'HDR' shown in Lost Coast is expressly designed to try and mimic how the human eye sees things to make the experience more immersive. If we're in a dark room then indeed we can't resolve details in the bright outdoors until our eyes adjust.

This is literally what I'm dealing with after buying an HDR monitor. Although I'm happy with Cyberpunk 2077's implementation of it. Even certain areas in Mass Effect : Legendary Edition look great with it.

Personally I think that well-presented HDR on a high quality HDR screen has a transformative effect, not a subtle one. I really wish it was more readily available in monitors and more widely supported in games and content as a result like you mentioned in the video. It is very much not a gimmick and I think makes images pop far more than any further increases in resolution would (surely 8K TVs have reached the official threshold of diminished returns in that space). I have no knowledge of the amount of extra work or expertise needed for games to present HDR well, but it seems to be significant based on how rare it is lol

You've perfectly encapsulated trying to keep up with the latest tech... most the time its better to just stick to whatever is mainstream.

It's crazy how there are many "HDR" monitors that are lacking in both brightness and pixel depth, some monitors say they are HDR400 with 8 bits per channel, when in reality they might only be 6+2 (6 bits of actual voltage regulation + 2 bits for a strobing effect) and even then the 400 nits is almost the same as standard monitors can achieve... A proper HDR monitor imho is one with at least 10 real bits of precision per channel with at least 1000 nits brightness, however brightness is less important than color accuracy.

HDR breaks my warmth screenfilter and results in a sudden flashbang every time

I feel your frustration, and to do my part I did my best to make HDR in Talos Principle 2 look the way HDR is supposed to look. Given that you really enjoyed the first game, I look forward to hearing how you feel about the HDR implementation in the sequel.

I think a big factor in lack of game support is game developers being paranoid about what their game will look like on different HDR monitors. With SDR, there's a well established standard to aim for, where artists can go "if it looks good on my screen, it will look good for the player" With HDR, all that goes out the window and you kind of have to do the lighting, camera and postprocess tweaking *all over again* for HDR, with no guarantee it will even look right once it gets to the player.

The more I learn about HDR the less I feel like I actually know about HDR :(

It's next to impossible to take a screenshot in HDR, especially one with a large dynamic range or in stardard formats like EXR. That alone is insane.

Hey Philip, I do not know if you already heard but the new Steam Deck OLED is capable of HDR too. This is big news because there has not been proper HDR for Linux until now.

Valve claims that the Steam Deck has better HDR support than Windows, I'd be willing to believe them. Although some games with HDR support like Strange Brigade don't let you turn it on when playing in Gamescope. That being said, have you tried out Special K's HDR retrofitting? It's a game changer for games that don't natively support HDR.

BF1 also had some good HDR as far as I remember. My issue with HDR on PC is how half the games that support it require you to enable it in the windows settings first. Which always causes issues for me during my normal PC use if I leave it on. Like apps and websites being washed out. I don't want to have to go to that setting and manually toggle it every time I am loading up specific games. So I just end up not using it in those games, despite paying so much for my monitors.

Editing HDR is absolutely the hardest part. With the correct settings OBS looks identical to the real thing during playback (when VLC isn't lagging from the high bitrate) but exporting it through an editor with settings identical to OBS leaves the lovely bright colours only slightly too pale and I don't have the patience to spend hours tweaking colour and balance levels. HDR is quite the rabbit hole.

I made a significant effort to understand the details behind how HDR works back when I got my first HDR-capable TV. I was very enthusiastic about this tech, as all the demos and such I had seen seemed so striking and vivid. But when I actually tried to understand how to use it, I found almost no solid documentation, and eventually I more or less gave up. Today I use the media player MPC with a plug-in called MadVR to view HDR content on my TV via my PC. No idea how "correct" of a result this provides though. I've tried cross-referencing the appearance by playing the same movies on my phone (via Disney+ for example) and trying to change all the MadVR and TV settings to match that look. I think it's mostly the same now, but honestly who bloody knows. I've tried doing similar things with games. I'm usually very pleased with how PS5 games look in HDR, so in the cases where I own a game on both PS5 and PC, I've tried matching the HDR appearance of the PS5 on the PC. But this is kinda hit-and-miss, because even if one game looks good with one set of settings, others may not. Maybe there just aren't that many PC games that have proper HDR implementations, or maybe I just don't know what I'm doing. I will say though that the PC port of "Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart" looks spectacular. I feel that it looks more or less the same on PC as it does on PS5, which is to say absurdly brilliant. I wouldn't say this is a very good game overall, but it's likely the most visually striking one that I've played, and my go-to example when I want to show off HDR to people who visit. Anyway, cool video. Thanks for providing some more insight into this rather messy topic.

It's worth noting that HDR support in Windows 11 is much better than Win10, although still far from perfect. Using the HDR Calibration Tool also helps a lot. With the way I have my system set up, HDR is always on, but SDR content and the Windows desktop still look good, and HDR media/games look great in my opinion. AutoHDR is also pretty good for games that don't have native HDR.

Thanks Philip, love this kind of video where you go over a subject I know very little about. Explained excellently

My best HDR experience as someone who bought an LG Ultragear monitor about 6 months ago has been the Dead Space remake. The implementation in that game is just ridiculous. Looks amazing.

I love this channel! The voice along with the music theme is just so great. Every single one of the videos I watch from you just feels right at home. Thank you!

A good HDR test video is the one with the glass blowers, you've probably seen it already but the brightness of the furnace looks amazing on an HDR screen

"Dynamic Range" refers to a very simple concept: The difference between the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. The issue with talking about it is the way it applies in several different ways. For examples: - A camera can be HDR in the sense that it can capture really dark and really bright colors with great detail. (though usually "HDR" isn't used in favour of just... measuring the dynamic range in "Stops" which is more or less a measure of how many times you can double the brightness before you reach the maximum brightness) - A game can be HDR if it renders things with colors brighter than white. (even if they get tonemapped back down to SDR later) - Content can be HDR if it stores colors brighter than white. - A monitor can be HDR in the sense that the darkest black and lightest white it displays are very far apart in brightness. (even if it doesn't actually display "HDR content") - And finally, what people usually mean when they say "HDR", is that the game rendered in native HDR, stored the image in HDR, and sent it to a monitor which can interpret colors brighter than white, and has enough dynamic range to display them at a satisfying brightness. It's that combination that's incredibly rare.

omg thank you for this, the support most monitors claming to have "hdr" is also horrible. There are so many displays with horrible hdr that can give you ghosting or flickering. True good hdr is a hard gem to find

Professional video colorist & HDR mastering engineer here. Agreed with most points in the video. Besides the technical challenges, there's also a cultural ones. Just like when stereo came out and musical instruments would get panned wildly all over the place, or when surround sound came out and every movie had to have something rotating behind you for "wow" factor, HDR has similar issues. Often the brands / marketing / directors either hate HDR or love HDR, and thus push things in various directions. Attempting to "wow" customers for their money by overdoing it, or if they hate HDR they'll publish HDR content that's identical to the SDR content, sometimes even out of spite. Even if identical content gets published in SDR/HDR containers, it often won't look identical, because the controls for scaling brightness (called the diffuse white level) are either missing or poorly explained on most consumer displays. For instance the SDR mode on your TV might be set twice as bright as reference, but then the HDR mode might be bang on reference, thus looking weirdly darker. Even worse if your viewing environment isn't appropriate for reference brightness levels (trust me it's not!). That's assuming the HDR mode on the display even performs as well as the SDR mode, and that the playback device is properly switching modes, or properly compositing the mixed content within the UI. The only consumer product that gets this right out of the box at the moment (including mixed content UI compositing and brightness scaling) is modern iOS devices. (The standard is BT.2408 by the way). Chromium browsers & the latest Pixel devices are on their way to getting it right soon as well, from the looks of their developer forums at least. (Google is making a big push for BT.2408 and Gain Map HDR (Ultra HDR) photos support.) Just like how a good surround sound mix should immerse you but not distract you, an HDR grade is good when you can barely tell the difference. It is better if you directly compare, but not in a way where anyone sitting next to you would notice or care unless you pointed it out. When HDR is used in this way, it is more likely to give all users a better & more consistent experience, and there will be little to no difference between distribution standards either (HDR10, Dolby Vision, etc.). It is only when pushing to extremes that the standards differ, and displays struggle. Finally, HDR video will almost always need to be carefully curated by the hand of an artist / developer / filmmaker. The idea of cameras immediately outputting HDR-ready video is likely to never work all that great, because just like how surround sound needs context to be done well, HDR video needs context to be done well.

You have one of the most consistently interesting output of videos, thanks, across all your channels

Never thought I would be blinded by my phone until I watched HDR content in the dark 💀

I’d be interested to see a follow up on how windows 11’s auto HDR feature factors into this. As someone who has a high end HDR tv connected to my gaming PC, I’m wondering if windows 11 is worth the upgrade.

theres a new cool feature on pixel 8 that you can take hdr photos which map the brightness. And when you display those photos the screen is brighter on the bright areas and darker in dark, looks amazing.

HDR is one of those things where one bad experience makes you just want to not bother. For me that was RE2 Remake, it felt like I could get the monitor to run in HDR but not the game, or the game to run in HDR but not the monitor. Between that and how funky auto HDR is in windows for playing older non-HDR content, I just leave it set to off now because it's not worth having to juggle these settings depending on which game im playing that day.

I think the lack of mainstream HDR monitors is the biggest issue. I've been using an OLED TV as a monitor because the other options suck.

I just got the Pixel 8 which actually has an HDR screen, and I'm blown away by it. Whether its completely genuine or not is besides the point, in a picture of a landscape the clouds actually glow white, it looks so much more realistic and almost tricks you into thinking it's slightly 3D. Colors are so much more nuanced, they're clear while not being oversaturated or undersaturated, it's very genuine. So now I want a computer monitor with actual HDR, and I'm finding it's not really possible without shoveling out my bank account and risking ruining an OLED with burn-in, just to get a patchy broken experience like Philip is describing

new personal record of Philip not mentioning Half-Life 2 is 1:12 minutes!

SpecialK does a pretty nice job of converting SDR games over, not perfect but a lot better than AutoHDR anyway, and you can also dial in the brightness you want with it, sometimes I actually prefer the HDR from SK over the one included with some games too.

The resolution thing hits home pretty hard. Even now, monitors with a minimum of 192ppi are rare and never the ones they're advertising. Instead they just keep pushing bigger, wider, and/or curved monitors that have the same mediocre resolutions and only work at 150-175% scaling which looks terrible.

I used to use HDR and fight it in my editing, but gave up and now I don't use a selling point of my monitor anymore lol. The only thing holding HDR back is the fact editing software isn't caught up yet even though they've had enough time to

very informative video. I always confused all the different types of HDR. keep up the good work.

My experience with HDR has been things just looking more washed/blown out. Maybe it technically looks more realistic? IDGAF though if that's the case, I just want my game to look nice. My 10bpc full dynamic range IPS monitor does that just fine.

Great video, would have been even better if you explained the HDR color gamuts as well. SDR is all rec709 colors, HDR also adds DCI-P3 and rec 2020 colors. It's not about just more brightness. It's also about pure blacks too, I'm guessing this is why you showed OLED tv and you represented the lack of pure blacks on most LCDs on your graph but yeah it's worth insisting.

The examples of HDR were really cool. If I make a 3d game I'd love to make use of real HDR. My eyes are immediately drawn to the brighter areas. It could make for intuitive level design.

Games I've played that had good HDR on PC: - Doom (2016) - Horizon: Zero Dawn - Uncharted - Shadow of Tomb Raider That may be it... I want to put Cyberpunk 2077 on this list, but there's something weird about the HDR in that game that still feels a bit off even after 2.0. I think it's something about the mid-gray tone mapping, although it's hard to describe even though this is literally my job. And two of those are ports of PlayStation games. On that note, consoles have had some great HDR content, mostly due to the consistent set of capabilities across users and broader support for HDR on TVs rather than computer monitors (I play on an HDR TV in my living room, even for mouse/keyboard PC games).

Excellent video. I work on the Luma mod for Starfield to address that lack of good HDR in video games you mentioned. Just some things I want to mention from watching your video. Tone mapping is when you take the raw scene (eg: Sun is 10K nits) and map it to your output (eg: 100 nits SDR, 1000 nits HDR). If you do it linearly, then you stretch. But that's a bad tone map. You basically want the first 0-15 nits to look identical but roll off the rest. Something at 5K nits shouldn't be 50nits on SDR. It would be close to 95 nits. It's nerdy math, but good tone mapping has a curve. If you want to make your HDR mastered video look good in SDR, you want to rebuild that curve again, but for SDR. The BT.2446a is a good way to tone map HDR down to SDR without making everything washed out. But yes, you as the video producer or gamer, or even video game designer, really should have to concern yourself with all this. We all need better tools. Great video!

This video represents me very well. I also went through a lot of frustration. I have an HDR compatible setup and after months and months of trying to get it to work I gave up... for now i am sticking with SDR. Maybe in the next five years HDR will have more support and become a standard, but for now it seems that the next improvement is OLED screens

I really like what Special K can do with games with broken HDR implementation!\ DOOM Eternal really has the best HDR I've ever seen. The colors just pop, there's so much detail that you can't see with SDR.

Finally! This is such a concise way to explain it. As a photographer and digital artist, I've had to deal with the pains of HDR and the joys of color spaces like sRGB, Pro Photo, AdobeRGB, and the fun new Display P3 and what screens can display them properly. (And I refuse to try and deal with printer inks and color calibrations.)

This is great timing given Steam Deck OLED has just came out, while simultaneously and casually solving the HDR problem that Windows has by making it in-line with Console HDR

I just bought my first HDR capable monitor today and now this pops up, coincidence? I think not

posted in november 2023. so bold. so relevant and topical

Great video. For me, turning off HDR in Windows and restarting my recording software (ShadowPlay for me) works to capture normal footage without it being overblown or washed out, maybe that will save you some time not having to restart your PC every time, but knowing you, you already tried that haha

No seriously, recording in HDR is a NIGHTMARE! Countless clips thrown away because something cool did happen, but either i couldnt capture because shadowplay disabled itself, or shadowplay broke midway through because of HDR. Funnily enough, the only capture that seems to work is the default WindowsKey + G "game bar" but dont leave it running too long, else it suffers a ram leak and i have to force close it in windows 😮‍💨

The Steam Deck OLED is going to be my first HDR display. Looking forward to seeing what it’s all about.

Thank you. I really thought it was just me. I'm glad I'm not alone on this.

the last sentence hurt. I have an HDR Monitor and don't even bother anymore using that feature :(

All they had to do is increase the bit depth of SDR, perfectly backwards compatible, instead they made a system where your TV decides for you what kind of picture you are going to see, of course that made a hot mess.

Imagine not pirating Adobe products...

Resident Evil 8 has pretty good HDR support if you ever feel like trying that, I spent a lot of time moving between dark and light areas like caves just mesmerised by how good it looked. I feel like more AAA story mode oriented games need to use it properly, It does bring a lot of extra quality out of games graphically.

Yet another win for the CRT monitor; here I was thinking "man it sucks CRT will never get HDR" but as it turns out SDR is going to be the king for a long time; simply because it's something that designers can rely on that everyone has access to. Imo, there will probably be an HDR 2 or SDR+ before a standard implementation of normal HDR will ever be a thing. What if, instead of expanding the range to be potentially infinite (up to almost blinding brightness) We just... expanded the range to around the average of what new panels can actually hit? and say "hey this is the new standard, if you do this range, you're SDR+" And because it's a known range shared between all SDR+ monitors, color balancing should be a lot easier right? You could even have both; HDR could be like the unlocked mode for display enthusiasts who want to squeeze out extra light resolution who don't mind a lack of content support, with SDR+ being the easy "It's better than SDR" choice.

Another thing to add to this: It's not just highlight and shadow details that HDR enables. There is... another. Color gradients in SDR/8-bit color necessitates color banding due to lack of subtle color representations. HDR/10/12-bit adds in many, MANY more color options to reduce that banding. Without HDR, the only way to make banding less apparent is dithering, which is how most games today handle it and they hide the dithering with awful generic film grain.

Thanks for putting this to words and out there. For the longest time, it has bothered me. A lot. I have enjoyed HDR in the living room since the days of PS4. Currently even most of the streaming services put out Dolby Vision like it's a norm. Even my iPhone hops in and out of HDR like a champ. And it's all great. But at the same time my PC, with state of the art hardware and OLED monitor - it's a hot mess of a user experience trying to use HDR. Manually toggling it on and off. Half of the "HDR" being some sort of pseudo-HDR shenanigan. And at the same time PC Master Race seems to act like it's all fine and dandy.

It's slowly getting better, 2 of the year's best games feature great HDR implementations: Baldur's Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2. AW2 in particular really stands out, especially when using ray tracing. It's also the only game I'm aware of that makes use of Windows 11's HDR calibration profile. BG3 makes great use of HDR for things like spell effects and shafts of light in underground caves. Another very good sign is the Steam Deck OLED: a proper HDR display that is more accessible to the average gamer. Let's hope it's easy to use....

At this point point i'm kinda rather glad i did not pursue an HDR monitor at the end, in like 2019 i was looking for a new monitor, wanted to go HDR cause i love deep blacks and brights for colours, it's why i often went with VA pannel monitors since they tend to have the best but all of the offerings for HDR monitors were either too expensive still or simply lacked other things i wanted from them. At this point, it almost feels like HDR will never properly get adopted and instead things like a full on different display pannel such OLED will be the main way to get more better and deeper colours.

Well, the new steam deck now supports HDR. I don‘t know it myself but I do think it works well. This is great, because it is the first time I heard of HDR on linux as well. As Lightroom now also just got an HDR mode, I am confident that it is getting better. But I also have problems with it all the time, so I just leave it off mostly.

HDR is super overrated. Better tonemapping for SDR is where it's at. Maybe eventually the support will be good enough to be worth it.

Bought a 240Hz about two years ago, "Wow this has HDR!", tried it once or twice and haven't bothered with it since. You can make an alignment chart of various HDR implementations.

If you think being left behind on PC feels bad now imagine what it's like for those of us old enough to remember CRTs. In 2005 I was gaming on a 24" screen with zero input lag, zero pixel response times, an enormous color gamut, incredible brightness and contrast, and at a resolution of 2048x1536. It's taken us nearly 20 years just to get CLOSE to that in resolution alone, and we're still nowhere near the smoothness and speed of electrons in a vacuum refresh rates of CRTs.

I wonder if the Steam Deck OLED will lead to more developers implementing HDR properly. The early reviews all seem to praise HDR content on the new screen, *if* the developer has implemented it properly. Games with bad implementations, on the other hand, were often called out for that. Maybe having a popular, HDR capable all-in-one device, like the Deck, will a) make it easier for developers to implement and test HDR and b) give an actual incentive to do so.

There's HDR processing, and then there's HDR content, the two are drastically different concepts, even if the two need one another for HDR content.

i love the points you made here thank you

Love your content, Phil!

I think most PC gamers are still on IPS displays with terrible contrast ratios. Even though they are "HDR400 certified", content looks dark and underwhelming with HDR enabled. Maybe when OLED or at least decent local dimming displays become more mainstream we'll see more HDR content and support.

For now at least when using an OLED monitor you feel like you're getting the benefit of HDR while in SDR alone because of how much contrast there is, it sort of simulates the HDR spectrum when you can go to absolute zero blacks making your eyes themselves need to adjust sometimes. Turning HDR on to me is a much less noticeable difference than the monitor itself

great video with nice explaining

1:26 - 1:40 looked the most realistic to me because, isn’t this how our eyes work?

We need to go back to crts man no native rez good contrast. Shit was good (minus the weight and size)

I see you use CS2, that means it uses AutoHDR which means it’s uses the OS max nits.. So 1. Make sure to turn off any Tone mapping feature on your monitor and if you using a TV turn on HGiG . 2. Use the Windows HDR calibration tool to set your max Nit. Than open CS2 again and it will be correctly mapped.

it's crazy how so many things developed before "getting colours and brightness right" did Like even 5 years ago getting a monitor that had just 100% coverage of sRGB couldn't be taken for granted

HDR in the PC version of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice was also great and the first time I understood the difference it could make.

just saying hi to to philip because he said he reads every comment :)

You can absolutely fix every hdr issue on windows 11 PC, wether it be black crush, colour banding or brightness issues by using reshade software and downloading custom color profile's.

Great video, another great example of HDR in games is Sea of Theives. For such a jenky gameplay loop HDR sunsets in that game almost rival sunsets in real life

I've been pc gaming on my high end tv for the past few years and it's just something else... 4k from up-close on a big screen (even 1620p, 1800p) gives me so much detail, I don't think I can go back to monitors. Not to mention the HDR, everything has details and the highlights can be "blinding" sometimes. Nowadays most games have HDR but not too long ago it almost felt like it was console exclusive.

I'm doing HDR Bracketing capture of my rooms for photogrammetry and gaussian splatting scenes, and I agree. It IS a hot mess

Tbh, I think there's a greater chance of OLED monitors becoming mainstream way before HDR does. I too have an HDR monitor that I can't use for most of the content I consume, and it feels like a terrible financial decision.

HDR is getting a lot better this year, at least in media production. Both Premiere and Lightroom now support HDR displaying on a proper display (eg, OLED), and oh damn, it looks gorgeous ! I checked some of my old pictures which I preserved in RAW and they look stunning, never knew my camera's sensors takes images with so much contrast detail and vivid colors. I just looked at them wrong so far...

Thabks for the only vids ive seen with hdr

A more accurate video title would be HDR is a hot mess for computers. 4K Bluray and streaming services have had HDR for movies and TV shows since 2016 and since the process is so streamlined it rarely goes wrong and HDR improves the image over SDR overwhelmingly more often than not.

dont care, my montier is SDR TN 165hz -burger40

Holy shit this video explains everything about HDR perfectly, and that chicken and the egg analogy is the perfect way of describing the HDR struggle, it seems the only way to have HDR enabled and accurate is to, like you said, adjust it in multiple programs and even compare it back and forth to the SDR image. i spent 2 hours trying to figure out RDR2s HDR and all the configs I use only work for that specific game IN FULLSCREEN (because HDR isnt supported on windowed FS games)

HDR in games doesn't shift light depending on focus (though that effect makes use of it). It uses more bits for the color buffers. Similar to other HDR content. A tonemapping effect is then applied to downsample that into SDR ranges to display it on normal monitors.

Nothing beats HDR on an OLED screen, anything else is just a crime against humanity.

Watching this on an OLED monitor on Linux... in SDR because of course

When my ASUS ROG Swift PG35V (a crazy HDR 1000 monitor) I remember I tried either Battlefield 1 or 5 and was blown away by how bright the sun was. Real HDR content is so rare that even today, after years of owning this lovely monitor, I still get blown away when I see something being in actual HDR. It's pretty rare :(

Oh man time to turn on the old HDR TV for this video.

HDR is amazing when used correctly.