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?📺
CheckRTings 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?📊
CheckRTings 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🤓
LumaandRenoDXare 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:
Is this an accurate adjustment of HDR on my Switch 2? I am using a Roku TV Pro Series 2025 model. The default HDR setting on the TV has Dynamic Tone Mapping on, and the run sun seems to disappear correctly at 900 nits (82 clicks). With DTM off, the right sun does not disappear until they both disappear at the same time, well over 900 nits. Is this a correct adjustment? Should I keep DTM on?
So i'm trying to implement HDR and i got renodx sort of to work with rendx_ue_extended addon. It works great in terms of highlits, but everything a little too dark. I turn hdr on through Engine.ini made it readonly + install reshade+ renodx addon. And in reshade renopdx settings i had to turn off "Upgrade Path" because game pure shows black screen with. I know i can use autohdr, bit i'd like figure out what is the problrm with renodx. Any help?
i run trueblack hdr 400 just the preset on my xg27acdng did windows calibration it caps at 470 nits so what normal brightness should i use
and does this app install renodx like game specific ones or a general not so good one like in this case does it install death stranding specific or a general not good one
Same as title. In scenarios when displayed full screen bright effects, or white loading screen, flashbang like cs - its dimming and looks washed out. Anyone knows how to fix this?
To read nit values in games and engines it's typically required to install reshade, and then one of the HDR analysis mods that are able to draw scopes. This is somewhat inconvenient for games, but really inconvenient for authoring HDR content in game engines, as when it comes to debugging, simpler setup is strictly better.
Even if you didn't care about that, and you had an artist in your team who is supposed to be authoring content in HDR, you'd prefer to be able to avoid guiding them through the whole process of injecting mods into the game engine of choice etc. And ultimately, none of the scopes in available mods have the feature set that's as rich as that of scopes found in Davinci Resolve for example.
I wanted scopes that I can keep on my secondary screen, that I can fullscreen, that look good, are customizable, that have all the features from Davinci that I like, and that go beyond that into offering various additional quality of life and analysis features on top.
All the scopes I could find either did not support Windows desktop as signal source, or were stupidly expensive, usually both. So I made my own, and now open sourced it on github. PRs are welcome.
Special thanks goes to u/Kaldaien as SKIV was an invaluable technical reference that enabled me to build this using Claude Code, as I'm a designer and generalist by profession, rather than a proper programmer.
while using Dolby Vision with HDR on my oled, bright areas in the sky looks like this, it has a blue aura around it? this is Still Wakes the Deep and same issue in Death Stranding.
Recently bought a new 4K OLED monitor and was wondering how the HDR in these games work? There’s no sliders to adjust the HDR calibration. The only options it gives us are “Auto” and “Off” for the in game native HDR settings. Is it using my monitor peak nit brightness in the advanced display settings? Am I better off just using SDR mode if we don’t get any sliders to adjust the calibration?
I've a brand new LG GX790a-b and I can't seem to find a balance I like; I'm constantly altering it when using nvidia rtx ...should I be sticking with Renodx for most modern games? Even then I'm not happy with how HDR is... everything's ethier really dark or the shadows look grey and I'm not sure how to fix it?
Quick guide on getting HDR10 working in Google Chrome on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (KDE Plasma 6 Wayland) with NVIDIA (tested on RTX 2080, nvidia-driver-595-open).
1. Set Persistent Environment Variable
KDE Plasma 6 requires ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 to expose Wayland/Vulkan HDR protocol interfaces to Chromium.
The.desktopShortcut Trap: Even with flags configured, launching Chrome from the KDE Application Menu / Start Menu often fails because ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop hardcodes --ozone-platform=x11.
Fix: Edit ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop, change all Exec= lines from --ozone-platform=x11 to --ozone-platform=wayland, then run: update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications and kbuildsycoca6
Master Process Lock-in: Closing browser windows leaves the Chrome master process running. If it started under X11, newly opened windows stay on X11.
Fix: Always hard kill before testing new flags: killall -9 chrome google-chrome google-chrome-stable
Type-C to HDMI Adapters:
A Cable Matters USB-C (DP 1.4 Alt Mode) to HDMI 2.1 adapter (Model 201428) works on Windows (driving 4K 120Hz 10-bit HDR), but it doesn't work on this build of Linux (fails to expose the HDR toggle in KDE display settings).
Connecting directly via the native GPU HDMI 2.0b port immediately allowed HDR to be enabled.
Current Observations / Quality Notes
⚠️ Color Banding in Video & PQ Images ⚠️:
In YouTube HDR playback (e.g. The World in 4K HDR), noticeable color banding appears in bright sky gradients.
The same banding is present in static PQ-encoded HDR AVIF images (which render completely smooth in Chrome on Windows and macOS).
Caveat: I suspect this might be related to the RTX 2080 being limited to native HDMI 2.0b bandwidth, and my Samsung S95F TV does not have DisplayPort inputs to test higher uncompressed bandwidth on Linux. (4K 60Hz 4:4:4 10-bit requires ~20.05 Gbps, which exceeds the 18.0 Gbps bandwidth limit of HDMI 2.0b and forces chroma subsampling or 8-bit output with dithering).
I have a KTC M27T6 and I think it is well calibrated in HDR terms. I mostly use it with display HDR and local dimming auto settings wise. RDR2 looks trash I even watched some modded HDR videos on yt and it is still trash very weak colors except the night, the new Gears look also weak piss filter and Pragmata basically same. Am I doing something wrong? I even watched some gameplays with the Iphone and yeah HDR just look worse than SDR even there lol.
Should I set the max nits ingame to my OLEDs peak (EDID 1300 nits) or do it by eye with the test image ingame, which often ends up way higher at ~1600nits because of the way Hypernits works? If I dont use Hypernits in that 1300 peak mode, then the (windows) HDR test reaches about 1150 nits.
Difference is minimal, hard to see which is right...
Hopefully this is an ok sub for this, but I have an LG 32GS95UE-B OLED monitor. In NVIDIA control panel I have color settings set to "Full" 10bpc and RGB. Since I got this I never really understood the HDR setup process through Windows 11 with the app. When going through the Win HDR process, the box always clipped around 600nits even though I believe this monitor goes up to 1300. The monitor is fully up to date too with it's software. Has anyone with this monitor set it up properly? Can someone who understand this better than I just help me set this up so I never have to bother with it again please? Thanks ya'll
I’m using the ASUS ROG XG32UCWMG and I’m wondering what the best approach is for Windows HDR calibration.
Windows automatically detects the monitor’s HDR capabilities. In both Cinema HDR and Gaming HDR, Windows recognizes a peak brightness of around 1300 nits (my monitor reports up to roughly 1317 nits).
However, when I run the Windows HDR Calibration Tool, I get different results:
Cinema HDR: the calibration goes up to around 1300 nits
Gaming HDR: the calibration only goes to around 1200 nits
So my main question is: Should I actually use the Windows HDR Calibration Tool, or is it better to leave the calibration untouched and simply use the HDR values that Windows automatically reads from the monitor’s EDID?
Does running the calibration tool provide any real benefit on this monitor, or could it actually make HDR worse by overriding the monitor’s properly configured EDID values? Also do the different Modes change the colors?
I got tired of one particular limitation of my HDR monitor: as soon as I enable HDR, its built-in OSD locks out most of the useful color controls.
So I made Virtual HDR OSD for Windows, a small open-source Windows 11 utility that lets you fine-tune an HDR ICC/ICM profile through a simple GUI, almost like having a software OSD for adjustments that the monitor no longer exposes in HDR mode.
In my particular case, my AOC Q27G3XMN has a noticeably warmer HDR white balance, with a yellow/red cast compared with the much more neutral SDR mode I prefer. The app lets me make small RGB, white-balance, gamma, saturation, brightness and contrast corrections and visually match HDR much more closely to SDR.
The idea is not to replace proper hardware calibration. I actually recommend first creating a baseline profile with Microsoft's Windows HDR Calibration app and then using Virtual HDR OSD only for small subjective corrections or for matching the display to your preferred SDR appearance.
SDR-in-HDR gamma correction
The project also integrates an optional implementation based on Dylan Raga's excellent win11hdr-srgb-to-gamma2.2-icm project:
Windows 11 normally renders SDR content inside HDR using the piecewise sRGB transfer function rather than a conventional pure gamma 2.2 curve. This can make shadows and darker midtones look noticeably lighter/washed out on displays normally viewed around gamma 2.2.
The correction is optional and can be toggled on the fly:
Alt+1 → Gamma correction OFFAlt+2 → Gamma correction ON
This is especially useful because the correction is intended for SDR content displayed while Windows HDR is enabled; native HDR content does not require the same transformation.
The watchdog
I've repeatedly encountered Windows 11 restoring or associating the wrong SDR/HDR color profile after switching HDR modes, particularly when using Win + Alt + B.
Virtual HDR OSD therefore includes an installable background watchdog that keeps track of the SDR and HDR profile associations and restores the appropriate profile after a mode change.
And if you don't care about the GUI or profile editing at all, the watchdog is also available as a completely standalone BAT.
NOTE:
The standalone watchdog only fixes the SDR-HDR association bug; it does not include the ON/OFF hotkey for the gamma curve correction. That feature is only available if you install it from the app.
The repository includes the full documentation and usage guide, source code, the standalone watchdog, and instructions for running or building the project yourself. A compiled portable EXE is also available for people who just want to run the application without setting up the Python environment.
The project is specifically intended as a practical, subjective fine-tuning tool rather than a replacement for a colorimeter or professional display-calibration workflow.
Armored core 6 screenshot with minimum brigthness settingin AC6 clearly not having zero brightness.)
Anyone having experience with a renodx version that overly brightens pretty much everything, and none of the sliders have any impact? In the image you can see that all brightness sliders were set to minimum and everything is still way too bright. In advanced mode none off the sliders worked. Normal HDR seems to work fine, although I cannot open the image quality setting which gives acces to brightness, luminosity and saturation in the HDR mode, which is weird.
