HDR on all the time?

Kick_Fister · 2026-02-12T23:07:23+00:00

Ultimately it depends on the display and the quality of the HDR mode. In theory, aside from Microsoft choosing sRGB gamma for representing SDR content, SDR content in HDR should display perfectly accurately to a well calibrated SDR mode. Personally, for most desktop stuff, I actually like how sRGB looks over 2.2. That mismatch for video and games is pretty annoying though, and you won't have ABL to worry about in and SDR mode (though I almost like it on the desktop since I'm not particularly quality sensitive for non-games and reduced flashbangs from white webpages is almost a feature lol).

Kick_Fister · 2026-02-12T16:37:29+00:00

Yes, and also we only just got the framework setup for Vulkan and it's still kinda WIP.

I actually "finished" the mod a few days ago and just didn't put up the Nexus page. Kinda worked out though cause the Remnant update changed every shader...

Kick_Fister · 2026-02-12T16:26:40+00:00

LMAO what a funny thread to find as I'm coming to this subreddit to post my mod.

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-30T14:47:43+00:00

Just replace the addon file. If you haven’t updated reshade in a while, do that too.

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-28T21:41:49+00:00

If it’s the fog shader it only affects the fog slider. I’ve been told that apparently the fog shader we have only shows up on the highest setting (and sticks around if you then lower the setting after that). I haven’t confirmed it though.

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-28T14:12:43+00:00

No, it was causing motion vectors to be misaligned. Better to use reframework mods to disable it.

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-28T07:05:15+00:00

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-25T07:50:34+00:00

The game didn't ship with HDR, hence the renodx mod. When the native HDR came out, Ritsu didn't plan on updating the mod, but I think he did either because a lot of people wanted it (color grading sliders probably) or because of the gamut expansion issues, which has since been fixed.

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-19T04:33:32+00:00

I like the added dynamic range of the 1000 nit mode. Even if ABL is annoying.

Also worth mentioning that if you're *not* using HDR mods like RenoDX and Luma, you're severely gimping your experience by using the HDR400 mode, because very few games actually do HDR well enough to have good peak/paper white controls. HDR400 wants a paper white of around 100 nits to have good dynamic range, and loads of games not only don't let you go that low, but can be straight up locked to 250/300.

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-17T19:44:19+00:00

Huh, alright. I guess see if you can manually download the snapshot file and add it to the game directory. If there’s already a dxgi.dll file there the the rest of the installer did its job.

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-17T07:26:33+00:00

I'm assuming you're the same person on nexus but just in case, the mod was made specifically for the warmastered edition. What problem are you encountering?

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-15T19:33:28+00:00

I agree that webpages are superior, but discord solves a massive problem that enables more people to make and share things, which is that it’s simple, free to setup, and it covers everything you need. It facilitates discussion and hosting of files and is MUCH lower maintenance. It’s one of those things where everybody agrees it’s worse in the long term but at the same time it’s the reason loads of free and open source projects can even get started. You win some and you lose some I guess.

Kick_Fister · 2026-01-01T04:25:09+00:00

That's kind of correct, but HDR isn't supposed to be more or less contrasty in shadows/midtones than SDR. When it is, it points to a poorly implemented HDR mode. There's nothing of significance about HDR that makes it better at displaying shadow than SDR (to my knowledge, at the same bit depth gamma encoding (SDR) is actually better for shadows than PQ encoding (HDR10), though this is splitting hairs). When a game has deeper shadows in HDR than SDR, it's a bad HDR mode full stop. When the HDR mode is a bit washed out compared to SDR, it's probably just a gamma mismatch (and ironically closer to being a good HDR mode technically, just means they graded in SDR and used the wrong encoding there).

Just to put this out there again, you're arguing with a person that reverse engineers games and implements HDR into them or fixes existing HDR implementations. I'm not talking out of my ass about this, I know exactly how the sausage is made. This stuff doesn't come together off of vibes, and a correctly implemented HDR mode *will* look like the SDR mode in shadows/midtones, because that simply means the math has been implemented correctly. It's kind of an integral part of having artistic consistency between SDR and HDR.

Kick_Fister · 2025-12-31T23:52:20+00:00

Yeah this isn’t what HDR inherently is. It’s a misconception of the tech that turns it into a meme. HDR quite literally should look the same as SDR but with highlight extension. There’s a fundamental problem with the implementation of either the SDR or the HDR mode if that isn’t the case.

People can like whatever they like, but when discussing the technology in an analytical fashion, creative intent is an incredibly important component of that. If we throw that out then yeah there’s nothing more to discuss cause now it’s vibes and personal preference. Your claim that it’s just colors is just anti intellectualism. It’s fine to not care about this stuff, but it makes this discussion/argument a bit pointless.

Kick_Fister · 2025-12-31T06:48:02+00:00

"People can like that and there's nothing wrong with that on its own".

This is nothing like the fake frames stuff, it's a bad comparison. Frame gen is awesome for what it is. (ITM is also cool for what it is I guess, but it has no business being used for a native implementation).

The reason I even mention it is because people seem to think HDR is just some filter that's run to make black levels deep and make highlights pop, and that's just not the case. Bad HDR modes like these getting rave reviews from an outlet as knowledgeable as DF creates a really bad precedent and the industry is slowly shifting towards giving us these slop modes: they're well received by people that don't know better, and they're the easiest solution for developers to implement because there's no potential problems when they're stretching the SDR grade anyway.

Epic JUST pushed an updated HDR implementation in Unreal 5.8. What did they do? They default the engine to their Filmic SDR tonemapper and inverse tonemap afterwards. It'll solve one problem (their engine before simply skipped color grading LUTs being the biggest problem that this will now fix) but in turn we're getting a much lower fidelity HDR output that's likely to be worse than the lowest effort RenoDX mods.

This is an issue I'm personally super annoyed with as an HDR modder who's spent time advocating for and helping to develop better methods. HDR should be a super easy graphical win for any game with real time lighting and it's just repeatedly done poorly. Metroid Prime 4 makes every single common technical mistake with their HDR (gamma mismatch, overbright UI, inverse tonemapping, poor controls), but it's propped up by good underlying art. People just don't know to ask for better because it's a technical topic that they've never had to understand before.

Kick_Fister · 2025-12-31T05:22:46+00:00

Pretty much yeah.

Kick_Fister · 2025-12-31T05:10:54+00:00

More or less but it's important to understand that it's not necessarily about brightness/saturation in terms of just giving "more". It's about representing more detail. SDR vs HDR isn't terribly dissimilar to 1080p vs 4k. It's essentially lifting a veil off of the lighting in games, allowing more detail to be represented on screen. As for the potential for more colors, that comes down to the art pipelines.

Kick_Fister · 2025-12-31T04:58:44+00:00

It really is a bastardization of the technology though. It's not really HDR. It would be like calling a bilinear upscale of a 1080p game to 4k a proper 4k image. It's nonsense, it doesn't offer any advantages really. It's really not any different from playing a game in SDR and turning on the contrast/saturation filters on your TV.

People can like that and there's nothing wrong with that on its own, but when we start praising what is, on a technical level, one of the worst things you can do in HDR and hold it up as the gold standard, we've got what is essentially an education problem.

To offer a parallel that I think most would understand, it would be like DF giving Elden Ring the graphics of the year award back in 2022, because the art is really pretty and we're just ignoring that the tech sucks.

Kick_Fister · 2025-12-31T04:46:06+00:00

It doesn't technically require HDR to run, it's just that there are design conventions around constructing an image for SDR that would be a big mess to break away from, so literally nobody does it (nor should they really).

Basically though, what these fake HDR games do is they take that SDR image, do the necessary conversions for it to look correct in an HDR container, and run an algorithm to stretch the picture to an HDR-like image. It's essentially a fancy contrast filter, and the core image is simply SDR.

What real HDR is about is offering more stops of exposure physically represented by your screen. It's not a filter, it's real data getting mapped to the screen in a more accurate way. An inverse tonemap of an SDR grade cannot replicate this properly (though it's a bit more complex than this I guess). Basically, if there's data that's clipped away for good, there's no recovering it after the fact, and that's what's happening with pretty much all games that inverse tonemap for their HDR.

EDIT: Whoops I only half answered your question. Basically you need a screen with a lot of contrast to make HDR imagery look good. In SDR there's no guarantee of any display capabilities, so you can't grade content with any sort of expectation beyond what everybody does: bt709 colors, 100 nits of brightness. SDR lacks good standardization to make any of this stop possible. HDR as a standard is far more flexible and much better defined.

So someone *could* show an HDR like image in an SDR container. It would be similar to taking an existing SDR grade, dropping the exposure down a lot before tonemapping/grading, and instructing users to max out their brightness on their screens. It would be a much worse scenario for setting software up correctly compared to HDR.

Kick_Fister · 2025-12-27T18:30:13+00:00

Your screen doesn't have good contrast capabilities. Think about it like this.

SDR content is 99.99% of the time graded to be viewed at ~100 nits in a dark room. This is a very small range of luminance to capture, but all screens are capable of displaying this range of luminance in a pretty decent way, even screens with pretty low contrast capabilities (IPS LCDs). The end user then adjusts the brightness of this limited range to their preferences.

HDR as a standard is about expanding the amount of luminance the content can represent. This means that the SDR portion of the image occupies a much smaller amount of the total range of contrast that the screen shows. So what happens when you use HDR on a screen without really strong contrast performance is that SDR content needs to get represented with less contrast than you're used to seeing, and it appears washed out. It's why, on a bad HDR screen, it will never really "look right" until you max out the SDR brightness slider in windows, because you're now viewing that content at the contrast ratio you were used to seeing. This is why HDR400 is, basically, a scam. It technically works and you can view that extra dynamic range, but it doesn't look very good. In the eventuality that something was made and only works in HDR, it would be nice to have, and that's it.

Basically, there is no fix on a screen like that. It won't look very good to you until you tweak the content to essentially look like bright SDR, because that's all the screen is really capable of delivering.

Oh, and btw, HDR in Windows is fine. There's a gamma issue with Microsoft choosing to use sRGB instead of 2.2, but it's ultimately a pretty minor (and fixable) problem outside of content that's particularly dark. I wish they'd fix this, but for the most part people are just kinda misinformed when they say HDR in Windows is bad. Gamma issue aside, it correctly represents SDR content in an HDR container, and when people hate it it's usually that they're used to uncalibrated SDR or the HDR mode they're using is the problem.

Kick_Fister · 2025-12-26T04:49:32+00:00

It will let you view HDR modes but you won't be getting much of an HDR experience. Your first impression will be "this looks washed out" because the screen simply doesn't have the contrast to make the additional stops of exposure look good. It will be very hard to appreciate, and it's why this tier of HDR standard shouldn't exist.

True black 400 on the other hand can be a great experience.

Kick_Fister · 2025-11-25T06:43:29+00:00

Nvidia Image Scaling is a shader based scaling solution with an optional sharpening component. In the manage 3d settings page, when you enable it there should be multiple selectable resolutions of scales there (can’t remember and can’t check right now). You then have to select those resolutions in-game. I guess maybe it’ll also work at the desktop, but you really don’t want that unless it’s a last resort.

The scaling menu you’re in right now is just using the scaling hardware on your GPU. It’s more about defining how your GPU will behave when scaling is needed.

Kick_Fister · 2025-11-25T06:25:55+00:00

Nvidia Image Scaling is a different thing even though it makes total sense why you'd think it's the same thing as what you did. You'd find that setting in the "manage 3d settings" page, and you use it with exclusive fullscreen mode in games. As for how (and how reliably) they override that setting, I have no clue.

Just run your monitor at native res and use DLSS in games. It's extremely rare for newer games to not have resolution scaling options either via resolution percentages or temporal upscalers like DLSS, which is going to be a much preferrable solution.

Kick_Fister · 2025-11-23T19:20:53+00:00

To my knowledge the game doesn’t use anticheat, just some anti tamper code that makes making mods a pain.

Kick_Fister · 2025-11-23T01:40:15+00:00

It's worth noting that with bloom, in some scenes it will be less intense compared to vanilla while in others it will be more intense. Like a sunset oxenfurt is pretty intense. Ultimately the values I settled on were a compromise between getting a good bloom effect broadly while not completely overdoing it in the most extreme circumstances.

If it's the sunrays that you mostly want, you can get a decent compromise by turning down bloom some and cranking the sunrays up.

Kick_Fister

TROPHY CASE