Am I doing HDR wrong?
Am I doing HDR wrong?
I have never used an HDR display before so I'm not sure how it's supposed to look.
I have been playing Spider-man both with and without HDR and unless I'm staring right into the sun there is literally no difference. I have always heard people talk about HDR as something incredible but I'm honestly disappointed.
I also played Tetris effect: connected and HDR seemed to just make all the menus darker, but the rest looked the same.
Have I done something wrong or is this how it is supposed to be?
HDR stands for high dynamic range. It means you can have detail in shadows and highlights without losing detail in the middle.
At the end of the day, it's just how your computer or console talks to the display. It doesn't change what your display is capable of. It can't magically make colors more vibrant, for example. What it does instead, with a quality display, is allow you to make specific colors more vibrant while keeping their detail, without losing it elsewhere. It should usually be subtle, except in specific showcases designed to push the edges of what HDR can do.
It also doesn't make a mediocre display not mediocre. If it can't accurately present the whole range, receiving it doesn't help a lot.
Edit: oh, didn't realize this is the steam deck sub. You probably can get actual feedback on the quality of the display, then. But it will still really only make a difference to quality if the developers made a specific effort to utilize it. Realistically, that's mostly on high quality lighting the steam deck can't really do.
Yeah, the difference should be easily visible assuming one has quality source material and a nice display. I was kind of assuming OP was talking about using the Steam Deck in docked mode, but maybe that was a bad assumption.
Someone else said the actual OLED doesn't support it. I never paid attention because I talked myself out of needing one, but if that's the case you obviously wouldn't see it on the deck screen.
I think you'd run into the limitations of render quality for most stuff 3D, though. There might be 2D games that play with it, and I'm guessing there are demo videos. I know my first (non-HDR) OLED I enjoyed trying some OLED demo clips out to really see what it could do.
People make HDR out to be a big deal. In reality it is barely even noticeable. Like going from 4k to 8k or 120 to 240Hz. Most people can't even tell the difference.
Thanks for the input. I got confused when people said Tetris effect looked "sooo much better" with HDR and I wasn't seeing any difference at all.
HDR, from what I loosely understand, is related to the color gamut (the reds, greens, and blues) the display can produce. The sRGB coverage used on most displays today is the BT 709 standard. HDR is the newer DCI-P3 standard, and it covers a wider range of colors.
But that's why games and systems that don't support those extra colors won't give you any extra "oomph" on an HDR display (because it's only coded to utilize the capabilities of an SDR display).
I recommend this article for further reading: https://tomshardware.com/news/what-is-hdr-monitor,36585.html
Idk about most people… the difference in black levels is willlld.
I still don't know how my HDR works or if. I feel like every time it's enabled it looks weird. Maybe because it's different, or maybe i'm doing it wrong but it's to much of a hassle to play with the settings. I feel like on the tv it's a bit different where i think it looks better.
Can you describe how you are enabling it? In-game? Are you adjusting it in game after enabling it? Is your deck itself set to full brightness (you obviously won't get the full 1000 nits if not)
Enabled it in-game. Tried default setting at first then raised the in-game max brightness from 1000 nits to 1200 nits to see if there was a difference but there wasn't.
I just tried raising the deck brightness and that actually made it look a bit better. I feel kinda dumb now that I didn't try that before. Still not the amazing difference people made it out to be but i could actually see a little bit of difference now, at least when I look at something bright.
If nothing else it should make the screen a heck of a lot brighter, max brightness is limited to 600 nits with SDR content but goes up to 1000 nits with HDR. For comparison, the LCD deck peaks at around 400, while this is 1400 from a 32" monitor.
Might also require correct HDR settings from the game to work properly? Not sure, don't have one myself.
Ask I correct that to get hdr, you need a game that supports it, the option enabled and a display that supports it? Also the oled deck display does not support it
The OLED Deck does have an HDR screen.
Oh, I didn't realize and I have one! Now I need to see it in action
I have 2 Samsung HDR televisions and I'll never buy another one. The image is dark, muddy and unwatchable in HDR. The only fix is disabling it on all connected devices.
Aren't there different "levels" of HDR? Most cheap TV's only support HDR10 which basically does nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the only quality the Steamdeck supports too. I haven't checked the specs though.
Edit: Nevermind, this is wrong :)
The new steamdeck oled has a peak brightness of 1000nits so I'm pretty sure its real HDR, and in the games I've tried it does look nice.
That's not what HDR10 means at all, it's just a different data encoding standard. Like Blu rays vs HDDVDs. A properly encoded HDR10 looks just as bright/dark in a proper monitor
Huh, you're right. I just looked it up. I was under the impression that there is also an HDR100 and 200 and so on. Thanks for pointing it out!