[sblantipodi]

I was playing Banishers before Nvidia released the new RTX HDR and then Nvidia released it.

This tech is a whole new experience.
The quality of the result is simply amazing, Banishers feels like a new remastered game once enabled this feature.

Games that doesn’t have native HDR changes completely and the difference is amazing.

I suggest everyone to try it out.
This is no way comparable with the Microsoft Auto HDR, this is way way better.
Differently from Microsoft Auto HDR, RTX HDR does not increase black levels, contrast is better, maximum brightness is better, tone mapping is more vivid. I love it.

[PCM2]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. I haven’t tried this myself yet as they haven’t added the feature to the regular ‘Game Ready Driver’ pipeline – plus I haven’t really had time to play around with new GPU features. But from what I’ve seen about it so far and based on Nvidia’s other technologies (DLSS, DLDSS etc.) I wouldn’t be surprised if it were vastly superior to ‘Auto HDR’. Which I have tried and found to be a terrible experience I promptly disabled, even on very capable HDR monitors.

RTX HDR should be a nice option not only for games which don’t support any HDR, but which have a bad HDR implementation. At least, if they don’t force enable HDR if an HDR signal is received – otherwise you’ll be stuck with what the game gives you. There is a slight performance hit (10-20% apparently) in enabling RTX HDR due to the processing involved. But usually when people want to an immersive HDR experience it’s for casual gaming where that will be a worthy trade off.

[sblantipodi]

enabling RTX HDR is now very easy (one click) with the new Nvidia App.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/software/nvidia-app/

once in game you can configure some params like maximum brightness, contrast, ecc using the usual ALT+Z shortcut…

Some youtubers benchmarked it and on a 4080 the performance impact goes up to 6%.
I agree that this “new auto hdr from nvidia” can be better than some games that has a bad HDR implementation.

[PCM2]

I’ve had a bit of a play with it, specifically on Cyberpunk 2077, as I was interested in how HDR would be ‘interpreted’ with RTX HDR vs. the game’s implementation. A complaint some people have with Cyberpunk 2077’s native HDR implementation is that it has raised blacks, which is seemingly part of the ‘art direction’ they went for. Whilst it may be able to achieve some deeper blacks or extremely dark shades and it was certainly vibrant on the colour side, RTX HDR (regardless of how things were tweaked) looked decidedly flatter. Neon lights and ‘specular highlights’ (such as sun glints on glass and shiny metal) just didn’t stand out as they should and the distinction of surrounding medium-dark shades just wasn’t as good. Still much better than ‘Auto HDR’, but unfortunately not like the game’s own HDR just with superior black depth.

This was with the Dell Alienware AW3225QF, so very capable of displaying HDR appropriately in the mainly mixed to darker scenes of Cyberpunk. So I’m going to put this down to being highly title dependent and something to try to ‘fill in the gaps’ for titles that don’t natively support HDR. But for those that do but perhaps don’t have an ideal HDR implementation, people will have to see for themselves whether they actually prefer the RTX HDR representation. It’s a cool technology either way and of course something Nvidia can work tweaking further – like many ‘AI’ technologies you can expect improvement over time. 🙂

[sblantipodi]

Thank for sharing your thoughts, very interesting.

I think that RTX HDR is born to bring HDR on games that doesn’t support HDR, in that games I think that it does a very good job.
Banishers has a lot of scenes where HDR can shine and the improvements are noticeable.

I agree with you, I doubt that a tech like this will be able to surpass or to match a native implementation, not now at least.

All in all there are still a lot of titles that has no native HDR and in that titles, having another option is great. 🙂

[sblantipodi]

Just for reference…
Horizon Forbidden West has been released on PC.

The HDR Native implementation seems not that good,
I prefer RTX HDR on this game than the Native HDR implementation… O_o

[sblantipodi]

all in all I don’t like neither the native implementation neither the RTX HDR…

are there someone who tried Horizon Forbidden West? 🙂

[Author]

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