I like many have been experiencing issues with the HDR implementation that I just can’t seem to get around.
While brightness isn’t an issue I just can’t get decent black levels. There’s just an overall haze to the game and areas that should be shrouded in darkness just, aren’t regardless of how low I bring the in game brightness to. Having seen videos from others I realize that no matter how much fiddling I do, I just can’t get the same sense of darkness/black levels they are.
I even went to far as to bring the game back into SDR and it looks quite a lot better and it feels more appropriate for this game to play with the darker look, but I miss the searing highlights and sense of depth that HDR brings.
I’ve looked around and can’t find anything definitive. I do realize I could have my calibration in windows off but I’m pretty certain I’ve got that nailed down. Any tips?
Current setup:
Windows 11
GeForce 3080
AW3423DWF (Peak 1000/Contrast @75)
Black levels .0001
Brightness 175
White levels/peak brightness 1050
I had this issue in many games. In SDR I have 70 contrast on monitor. In HDR that setting is greyed out and locked. No matter what I did in games everything was washed out like looking via milky glass filter.
Go to Nvidia control pannel, desktop setting of colors and try to set this: contrast between 70-77, gamma between 0.95-0.99. Made HDR actualy nice and useful for me in most games and also desktop use, when I was already giving up on it. Each monitor is different so it may differ just try to play with it until color is OK and its acceptably bright. There are still washed out places from time to time but in dark areas looking into dark corners its really close to real black.
Hi TriM. Yep, I noticed the same thing. Kind of washed out and haze overlayed.
Other games HDR are amazing (Cyberpunk etc).
Maybe it’s their implementation of HDR. Maybe it was bolted on at the end (just a guess).
I’m also using SDR now in game but my Auto HDR (feature in Windows 11 that you can enable) kicks in and it’s seems to be a bit better than the in-game HDR.
Maybe try that?
It’s the fog. They make it foggy and to not make it to distracting it is lessened nearer your character. Problem is in hdr and especially on an OLED this just loos like one of those filters that you can put on pictures that makes the edges a darker/lighter shade.
I hope they let us turn off the fog or they fix how it looks on hdr/OLED.
Edit: You’ll notice in sunny or areas with less fog it looks so much better.
I really hope they tweak this though because it looks like I have a weird screen filter in instead of the intended fog.
Edit: Found something that helps a lot.
I am running an LG C1 and playing on PS5.
Set game settings for brightness back to default.
On the C1 open game optimizer and adjust black stabilizer down from the default 10. 4 looks good to me currently. Then adjust game to bring back brightness to HP and menus and such.
Thanks for the tip, that helped. It was set to 10, decreased down to 6. I haven’t tried any daylight areas (maybe they’ll be too dark now?) but hopefully they’ll still look good.
I hope Blizzard improves their HDR implementation.
Have the same setup, well, minus the graphics card and the F version.
Just keep Windows auto HDR on and turn off in-game HDR. Game looks far better without in-game HDR. The game is dark but easy to see. The in-game HDR makes everything too bright and gray-toned.
Maybe RTX support will help but I doubt it. They need more work on HDR for it to look right. It’s the worst looking HDR game I’ve ever played, and the only game where I feel the game looks 10x better without it on. It’s a beautiful game without it on, especially on an OLED. Don’t stress about checking off all the boxes.
I ended up on 6 myself and raised the in game brightness settings to something like 400.
It helped minimize the haze. Looks pretty good everywhere.
Also raised up the white setting just a nudge but not sure that does anything on mine since I only see the difference when I go below a certain threshold.
My bright areas still look great.
I’m on a TCL c835 and I’m not using HDR. After mucking about with the settings a ton I reluctantly concluded it’s better with no HDR and just upping the color saturating a ton.
HDR also looked weird to me at first, i played on SDR but then figured out that it needs contrast maxed out in nvidia control panel settings. In-game i have black point on minimum and both brightness and white point maxed out. These make the HDR mode look good.
HDR is wasted on this game because of all the fog that’s everywhere all the time. But anyway, I have a 300 nit screen and 0, 400, 400 worked great for me. If you jack up the brightness and white point up too high, you lose intermediate shades. Play with the values until you think it’s bright enough without loosing those intermediate shades.