Enable HDR confusion

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Soldato
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I've been running a Razer Raptor for a few months now and have always had the HDR mode toggled on in the OSD menu.

Starting to wonder if this is the correct method for displaying a HDR gaming image? Confusion is around whether I need to have the monitor set to HDR, the windows display HDR setting turned on, the in game setting HDR turned on, or some combination of the above!

Advice appreciated
 
You need it enabled in all three.

HDR should be enabled on the monitor, otherwise Windows may not detect that it's HDR capable and not let you enable it.
HDR should be enabled in Windows for games to detect that you can display at HDR.
Some games will automatically detect that HDR is enabled in Windows and turn it on for you. Some may not, so you'd need to enable it in-game. You'd also need to adjust the HDR brightness settings in the game for optimal experience.
 
I find enabling it in Windows makes the desktop nasty and washed out so I leave it off. It does mean I don't get the option in game though.
I have it turned on in Windows for my TV because I don't use the TV apart from Steam big picture mode gaming so works well, but the nasty desktop puts me off using it on my monitor
 
I wish I could just say "enable this, disable that, and it will work perfectly" but alas not. Working with HDR (or at least, working with some things in HDR and others things in SDR) seems to be complicated.

I've got two HDR capable monitors, an LG 38WN95C as my primary one (general work and gaming) and a Philips PHL 436M6VBP for watching movies.

The LG doesn't have a specific HDR setting in its own controls, it seems to be entirely automatic. When I do something that sends a HDR signal (e.g. playing a HDR video) it goes black for a second or so then comes back, and displays "HDR" in a speech bubble at the top right corner for a few seconds to indicate it's in HDR mode.

That's with the "Use HDR" option in "Windows HD Colour settings" left off as standard. If I enable that option then it runs in HDR mode all the time - and it automatically sets the brightness to 100%, which would give me eye strain in only a few hours.

The Philips one on the other hand has a menu option to enable or disable HDR. Since I only use it for watching HDR movies I leave it enabled all the time, and the "Use HDR" setting in Windows turned on for it. I'm sure that previously this resulted in the Windows desktop colours looking washed out all the time on it, but when I tested just now they look correct. I'm thinking this might be due to the version of Windows though, maybe the HDR support has improved over time. I'm on Windows 10 20H2 right now, how about you @no_1_dave ?

So far so good. I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema for video playback, with the madVR rendered plugin. In that the HDR setting is "passthrough HDR to display", with "send HDR metadata to the display" ticked.

If I open a HDR format video file through that on my LG monitor, it then switches to HDR mode, and all the colour for everything (both Windows and the video file) looks seriously washed out. Once I double click to open the video in fullscreen though, the colours are then correct. It's kinda hard to describe how the washed out colour looks. If you want to test for it yourself, grab a HDR format video with really vibrant colour such as this one:

https://4kmedia.org/lg-new-york-hdr-uhd-4k-demo/

That should make it nice and obvious if the colour is correct or not.

Anyway - that's my experience with it, I hope it helps. Do a little testing, look for washed out colours or your eyes starting to bleed, if you get a setup without either of those things then you win HDR :D
 
I've just done a bit more testing with this actually and Windows now has a setting I don't remember seeing back when I got my Philips PHL 436M6VBP, maybe it was added to Windows since then.

In the Windows HD Colour settings there is now a "HDR/SDR brightness balance" section at the bottom with a slider to control the brightness of SDR content, once "Use HDR" is turned on. There is a 0-100 slider to control it. I did some testing and found I have to set it to 41 on my LG 38WN95C to get my desired 150 nits brightness level, the same level I normally get in SDR mode with the display control set to 15% brightness.

With that set correctly I can play a HDR video in a window (and get the appropriate high brightness level) alongside regular SDR content, without it looking washed out :)

EDIT: I've just noticed a downside to this actually - with this enabled my GPU core clock seems to never drop below 1266 MHz, even when Windows reports its usage as only 1%, just on the desktop background with no windows opened. Without it enabled, the core clock drops down to 139 MHz. I noticed since I have my case fans linked to the GPU temperature and they stop entirely when it's below 45c - having this enabled and the core clock not dropping as low is pushing the idle temperature up.
 
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no_1_dave said:
I find enabling it in Windows makes the desktop nasty and washed out so I leave it off. It does mean I don't get the option in game though.
I have it turned on in Windows for my TV because I don't use the TV apart from Steam big picture mode gaming so works well, but the nasty desktop puts me off using it on my monitor
Click to expand...
This has been my experience with my LG 27GL850-B as well, with the windows HDR setting. But I have noticed since the last update of On screen software that there is an HDR effect option that is far better.
 
Tanin'iver said:
EDIT: I've just noticed a downside to this actually - with this enabled my GPU core clock seems to never drop below 1266 MHz, even when Windows reports its usage as only 1%, just on the desktop background with no windows opened.
Click to expand...

Worked this out today myself - glad someone else came to observe before! Did you find any more tips out to deal with this?
 
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