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SvennoJ on 27 July 2020
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Dante9 said:
Flouff said:
Changed my TV for HDR when i bought the Ps4 pro. When it's well done i also prefer HDR over 4K.

I don't think those are mutually exclusive. 4K is resolution and HDR is just an added effect, right?

If done wrong, like in RDR2, yes it's just an added effect.

However if done right it expands the rendering 'depth' of the scene so much that screenshots converted to LDR suffer black crush and white outs or look overall washed out.

LDR or normal dynamic range is 8 bits or 256 'steps' from black to white with white calibrated to about 180 nits.
HDR is 10 bits or 1024 'steps' from black to white with white calibrated up to 10,000 nits (on a logarithmic scale)

Most HDR displays don't go over 1,200 nits for peak brightness, yet still a huge step up from 180 nits.
10 bit color also provides up to 4x as much detail in darker areas without color banding becoming an issue.

Most modern games are already rendered in FP16 (16 bit color) then down converted to 8 bit LDR or 10 bit HDR. Of course assets also need to support 10 bit color as well as the entire rendering pipeline. (That's where RDR2 fails)

You can render at any resolution and still have HDR. However only 4K tvs support HDR, but upscaling 720p to 4K is no issue.


What you get in the end is more detail in shadow areas, and more detail in highlights and high contrast scenes. Instead of the sky just looking white when looking outside from a darker room, it can now show what the outside looks like next to the darker interior without compromising either.

For example, in GT Sport, in LDR, spray from rain and dust is literally blinding in night races. Not because of the brightness, but because it all whites out on the display. You can't read the distance markers since they 'max out' in brightness and become unreadable. With HDR, the display can correctly display the brightness and you can see through the spray/dust and there's still contrast left to read the text on reflective road signs. It's also much easier to see the road in the dark. For normal day races, it's mostly the sky that gets more depth. Instead of looking simply whitish bright, you now see all the clouds in full detail.