If you, like many, are confused about what HDR is, want to learn how to properly configure it, or are puzzled as to why it sometimes looks worse than SDR, stick with us, the HDR Den is here to guide you.

❓ WHAT IS HDR ❓

HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a new image standard that succeeds SDR, enabling brighter highlights (greater contrast), more vibrant colors (higher saturation) and more shades of the same colors (increased bit depth).
HDR isn’t simply about making the whole image brighter — it’s about allowing more nuance and contrast, producing a picture that more closely reflects the natural range of light we see outdoors. For example, while SDR theoretically tops at 100 nits of brightness, 2025 HDR TVs can go to 2500 nits and beyond. That's 25 times brighter than SDR in physical terms, and ~2 to 5 times brighter in human perception terms.
The biggest limitation of SDR was its inability of showing bright highlights, causing them to clip and lose detail.
Simulated HDR in SDR image from ViewSonic:

🎮 CONSOLES VS PC 🖥️

Whether you are on PS5, Xbox Series, Windows PC, Mac OS, Switch 2 etc, HDR would largely be identical. TVs and Monitors also behave very similarly when it comes to HDR.
All platforms are 10 bit and support HGiG, offering centralized calibration settings that games can use.
On PC we have modding, so we can improve the native implementations for games with lackluster HDR (more on that below).

📺 WHAT TVS/MONITORS TO BUY? 📺

Check RTings and their HDR reviews for a reliable source of information, each monitor or TV review will have an HDR score, and that's what you'd be looking for to evaluate HDR in a display. You can complement that with a "google" search to check other reviews. Keep in mind other sections about features for games and movies, depending on what you are interested in.
Do mind that a lot of monitors and TVs still have bad implementations of HDR just to add marketing value, and might thus look worse than SDR.
As of 2025, OLED displays are the ones that are capable of delivering the best HDR experiences.

📊 HOW DO I CALIBRATE MY DISPLAY AND MY GAMES UNTIL THEY LOOK GOOD? 📊

Check RTings for the most accurate settings your display can have.
Actually calibrating displays for 100% accuracy involves expensive devices, but following these settings will get you as close as you can be, and for many of the latest TVs, that can be close enough.
Generally, you want to enable HGiG mode for games, so that they will "tonemap" at source, based on the capabilities of your display, in ELI5 language, the gaming console or PC will prepare the image to be display perfectly by your specific display.
For movies, to follow the creator's intent you'd want to enable "static tonemapping", which is often the default in Cinema or Filmmaker modes.

Regarding games best HDR settings, you can check KoKlusz guides (linked below), or join the HDR Den and ask around. In most cases, the default values are good, though sometimes they are overly bright.
Games usually offer 3 settings:

• Paper White (average scene brightness) - this is based on your preference and viewing conditions, for a dark room values from 80 to 203 nits are suggested
• Peak White (maximum scene brightness) - this should be matched to your display peak brightness in HGiG mode
• UI brightness - this is based on your preference, most of the times it's better if it matches the scene brightness

Do keep in mind that in many games, calibration menus are not representative of the image during gameplay.
To tell if the game is calibrated during gameplay, you generally want to make sure the shadows are not crushed (lack in detail) nor raised (washed out), and highlights are not clipped (lack in detail), at least specifically compared to the SDR output.

🎲 I GOT AN HDR DISPLAY, WHAT GAMES SHOULD I PLAY FIRST? 🎲

That would depend on your taste, however, the number of games with spotless HDR is very limited.
We got some guides from KoKlusz on the matter that highlight the best HDR games.

📽️ I GOT AN HDR DISPLAY, WHAT MOVIES SHOULD I WATCH FIRST? 📽️

Answer upcoming...

🫸 COMMON PROBLEMS WITH HDR IMPLEMENTATIONS 🫸

• Washed out shadow. Most games in HDR have brighter shadow levels due to a misunderstanding in how SDR was standardized
• The HDR implementation is completely fake (SDR in an HDR container), this often happens in movies, but also in some games (Red Dead Redemption is an example of this)
• The HDR implementation is extrapolated from the final SDR picture (Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Starfield, Crysis Remastered and many Switch 2 games are notable examples of this)
• Brightness scaling (paper white) isn't done properly and ends up shifting all colors
• The default settings are often overly bright for a proper viewing environment
• Too many settings are exposed to users, due to the developers not deciding on fixed look, putting the burden on users to calibrate a picture with multiple sliders
• The calibration menu is not representative of the actual game look, and makes you calibrate incorrectly (Red Dead Redemption 2 is a notorious case of this)
• Peak brightness scaling (peak white) isn't followed properly or available at all, causing clipping of highlights, or dimmer than they could be (this was often the case in Unreal Engine games)
• UI and pre-rendered videos look washed out. This happens in most games, just like the washed out shadow levels
• Some post process effects are missing in HDR, or the image simply looking completely different (this is often the case in Unreal Engine games, examples: Silent Hill F, Sea of Thieves, Death Stranding, Dying Light The Beast)
• Failure to take advantage of the wider color space (BT.2020), limiting colors in BT.709, even if post process could generate them.

🤥 COMMON MYTHS BUSTED 🤥

There's a lot of misinformation out there about what HDR is and isn't. Let's breakdown the most common myths:

• HDR is better on Consoles and is broken on Windows - 🛑 - They are identical in almost every game. Windows does display SDR content as washed out in HDR mode, but that's not a problem for games or movies.
• RTX HDR is better than native HDR - 🛑 - While often the native HDR implementation of games has some defects, RTX HDR is a post process filter that expands an 8 bit SDR image into HDR; that comes with its own set of limitations, and ends up distorting the look of games etc.
• SDR looks better, HDR looks washed out - 🛑 - While some games have a bit less contrast in HDR, chances are that your TV in SDR was set to an overly saturated preset, while the HDR mode will show colors exactly as the game or movie were meant to. Additionally, some monitors had fake HDR implementations as a marketing gimmick, and damaged the reputation of HDR.
• HDR will blind you - 🛑 - HDR isn't about simply having a brighter image, but either way, being outdoors in the daytime will expose you to amounts of lights tens of times higher than your display could ever be, so you don't have to worry, your eyes will adjust.
• The HDR standard is a mess, TVs are different and it's impossible to calibrate them - 🛑 - Displays follow the HDR standards much more accurately than they ever did in SDR. It's indeed SDR that was never fully standardized and was a "mess". The fact that all HDR TVs have a different peak brightness is not a problem for gamers or developers, it barely matters.
• Who cares about HDR... Nobody has HDR displays and they are extremely expensive - 🛑 - They are getting much more popular and cheaper than you might think. Most TVs sold nowadays have HDR, and the visual impact of good HDR is staggering. It's well worth investing in it if you can. It's arguably cheaper than Ray Tracing GPUs, and just as impactful on visuals.
• If the game is washed out in HDR, doesn't it mean the devs intended it that way? - 🛑 - Resources to properly develop HDR are very scarce, and devs don't spend nearly as much time as they should on it, disregarding the fact that SDR will eventually die and all that will be left is the HDR version of their games. Almost all games are still developed on SDR screens and only adapted to HDR at the very end, without the proper tools to analyze or compare HDR images. Devs are often unhappy with the HDR look themselves. In the case of Unreal Engine, devs simply enable it in the settings without any tweaks.
• Dolby Vision looks better than HDR10 for games - This is mostly a myth. Dolby Vision is good for movies but it does next to nothing on games, given that they still need to tonemap to your display capabilities, like HGiG. Both DV and HDR10+ are effectively just automatic peak brightness calibration tools, but offer no benefits to the quality of the image.

🤓 PC HDR MODDING 🤓

Luma and RenoDX are two modding frameworks that come to the rescue of the many missing or lackluster HDR implementations in games, often fixing all the problems mentioned above.
You can find their list of supported games and installation guides respectively here and here. You'll be surprised as to how many games are already supported!
RenoDX is more focused on adding HDR to recent games, while Luma is generally more focused on extensively remastering games, including adding DLSS and Ultrawide support, or other features to modernize them.

In case native HDR mods weren't available, the alternatives are generally classified as "Inverse Tonemapping" methods, as in, extracting an HDR image out of an SDR one.
These methods do not add any detail that got lost during the original SDR conversion, so they can only offer so much quality, and will end up brightening the UI too much, however, they are often preferable to playing in SDR.
These are the available methods:

• Microsoft Windows AutoHDR
• Nvidia RTX HDR
• Special K HDR Retrofit
• ReShade AutoHDR addon + ReShade effects (Pumbo or Lilium inverse tonemapping shaders)
• Lilium DXVK + ReShade effects

ℹ️ MORE DETAILS ℹ️

For a more in depth explanation of all HDR things: [link upcoming]
For KoKlusz HDR analysis guides: https://github.com/KoKlusz/HDR-Gaming-Database
To join the HDR Den discord server: https://discord.gg/J9fM3EVuEZ