HDR is a Hot Mess 

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 RU-vid videos directly and use the built-in RU-vid 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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 😮‍💨

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

"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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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 shouldn't have to concern yourself with all this. We all need better tools. Great video!

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

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.

Have HDR monitors and enabled it in Windows 10. I tried to adjust it many times and there was always something wrong with the image, colour or sharpness. Turned it off and image is nice, vivid and clarity issues were gone. e: Also image editing was mostly pain with HDR on.

I got a new pc and an HDR supporting screen a while ago. With W11 and auto HDR, I love how it looks on the games I am playing but I've noticed an annoying issue. As there seems to be something like a flickering as soon as there is movement in the image. Like on an online rpg with top down perspective the moment I move my character, the floor everything around me starts to 'light up' and it looks really weird and it's stressing my eyes. What is that and can I fix it?

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

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

How does it work when recording HDR in video games? Do you just set OBS to rec 2020? I’m considering getting a 10bit display for colour grading work but I’ve been fine for so long on an 8bit 100% Srgb display it seems rather pointless especially when anything for broadcast goes through a heavy quality control process anyway! And besides as soon as I get sent 12,14 or 16 bit footage I feel like we’re back to square one with “only” a 10 bit display!

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 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.

is it possible that enabling hdr on my monitor could cause slightly more input delay in games like CS? i saw a post about it from years ago and with your friend 3kliks recent input delay video and this one i figured i could ask.

Do you mind sharing the values you used in Jedi Survivor ? I mean the two sliders for bright and dark you can adjust in the game.

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.

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.

I have a samsung G8 Oled 1k+ monitor, however when I turn HDR on, it's just like the brighness and gamma is tured on, everything seems like the "SDR" that you show instead, anyone knows what I could be doing wrong?

I wanna add one of my Windows 11 experience: When I recording my gameplay videos in raw recording files, I noticed that if I rename that file I've recorded, the pixels when I play that video in any video player, have blurred a bit pixels and picture is not so sharp as it was in 1st recorded non-renamed file. So I keep original recordings in named folders and organize them that way. It's unfair to users. So in Windows 11 PRO best is to not rename just recorded file or you will lose the quality. I rename them after I get done with them in DaVinci Resolve and still keeping original file. Check that yourself. I would like the feedback on my experience with this.

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.

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.

I noticed if I enable windows 10 HDR it gets really bland everywhere except in a game that supports it. Why is this? I heard mentions of a color profile or something, but I want to know more. Or is this just because HDR is such a hot mess that it'll only look right if the displayed media is explicitly "working with HDR" to not make it a dim grey soup?

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.

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

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.

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

idk if its related to hdr in the slightest but sometimes i will see my screen shift in brightness on its own. notably when im on a bright white webpage in the middle of the night the screen will get even brighter. its very annoying and i cant seem to find any setting thatll turn it off

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.

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.

How does the old HDR method of composing multiple photos fit into this?

What is this feature called, where my monitor gets brighter when it shows a mostly dark image and darker when it shows a mostly bright image?

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

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.

Hey whats the music from 1:33 to 2:14 I feel like i recognize it from a source game/mod

pleas what is the music at 2:02 its make me remember a game but idk what is it

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.

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.

Dude it's so frustrating!! It's like I use HDR to see more detail, but what I get instead is an overexposed image! It's like turning HDR on in my computer and monitor makes everything brighter and more vivid, but then when I also turn it on in a game, it just makes it brighter and I lose details that were there when HDR was off??? I managed to get a good looking image in Insomniac's Spider-Man games on steam but I had to turn the HDR settings way down in the games. That has been my only successful endeavor in HDR usage :(

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

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.

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.

i love the points you made here thank you

Imagine not pirating Adobe products...

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.

tbh i really don't know what's with or what even is hdr but when i turn it on with my new monitor I just thought "Huh, the black is softer than before and things seemed a bit more desaturated" then turned it back off

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.

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

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.

Is this video available in HDR variant? I'd very happily rewatch it on my superior PHONE SCREEN :p :p

Is your background music available somewhere to listen to?

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.

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.

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).

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

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

HDR feels like something that's going to struggle to become a standard like a new resolution does. There's so much to it and complexities. My Xbox and TV has issues with it sometimes, the TV won't kick into HDR mode every time but the Xbox will and causes everything to look grey - and that's a whole problem in itself, HDR content looks terrible on non-HDR screens, worse than an actual SDR version of the same video. On the other hand, a 4K video will not look worse on a 1080p screen compared to 1080p video, in fact it would generally still look better. Same could be said for surround sound, which has had some similar problems. 2.1 audio doesn't sound great on it and 5.1 doesn't sound great on stereo. I think that's a big reason for sound bars taking over in recent years!

I have no idea what hdr is supposed to do, I turned it on for this video and everything became grayed out, my monitor aw3423dw

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

I have had a few Hdr T.V's with hdr 10 and the desktop always looks washed out and colorless no mater the settings .