Microsoft adds new Auto HDR features to Windows 11 – Gaming – News

Shooting HDR and displaying HDR are two different things.

Your description, taking two or three shots and extracting the lower and upper values ​​for certain pixels, is a good way to create a high (higher) dynamic contrast in a digital photo. That is independent of the color range.

When displaying on a screen, the dynamic range (maximum contrast) has historically been a major problem.

Now, over the past 20 years, monitors have gotten a lot better at displaying color gamut and contrast values. Even old footage (eg a VHS or DVD) will now look better (apart from the resolution). Digital image sensors have also been improved in both color and dynamic range.

With games you don’t have the problem of the recording sensor, but for playback it doesn’t matter what the source is.

Not all games are suitable for just playing in HDR, but a good system should recognize that and not enable the HDR header if the source is not HDR. You can of course choose to always have HDR on (an option that is on consoles, for example) and the image processing will then use an artificial HDR, which is often quite reasonable.

If you do that with color gamut, like an sRGB game being “spread out” over the color gamut of Adobe RGB for example, the result is usually a game with too bright green and red parts, and too much contrast.

It is always advisable to use the correct color reference when displaying.
Strangely enough, televisions often do this automatically, but monitors do not.
HDR is (more or less) separate from the color reference and is actually, more simply, the maximum light output. The higher the HDR rating, the brighter your image can be (and the higher your energy consumption).

HDR offers the possibility to have a higher upper value, so that, for example, the sun can look dazzling (no kidding). This is why some people say that HDR only works if you use Local Dimming. While that’s not a bad statement in itself, it’s not necessarily true. You cannot have a value lower than 0. The other end of the spectrum are the increasingly higher upper values. You have HDR1000 and now also HDR2000.

It’s personal for everyone of course, but I’m not a fan of HDR. That’s not because I have anything against the technology, but the implementation is just awful. I stray slightly from my answer, but I’d like to explain this.

When I watch a movie or play a game, I want to be able to see what’s happening. Not only is it irritating when I’m blinded, it literally hurts my eyes. I don’t believe it’s healthy either. You also don’t like to stare at the sun when you’re outside or shine a flashlight in your eyes.

Menus are often dazzling, subtitles are also seen as an HDR object and cannot be read.
A lamp, for example, is displayed as very bright and you often do not see what is happening in the dark parts of the screen. That is all beautifully realistic, the average program/game maker thinks, but that is not the case. The human eye reacts to certain influences and adapts … but if you look at a screen where the luminance / chrominance values ​​do not change while your eye wants and tries to, then your viewing experience is not nearly as pleasant and on time is very tiring. This also applies to other fun in-game tricks, such as Depth-of-Field and head-bobbing, which are unnatural.

Recording and playback are two separate things.
Does HDR have an added value? That’s personal.
It’s good that Microsoft is developing this further for Windows, but bad that it’s not included by default.

[Reactie gewijzigd door Dazenet op 27 april 2022 04:29]

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