I've never experienced HDR as good as this until now

13oots2

13oots2

13oots2

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I have spent months trying to get HDR to look good on 2 different OLED monitors, the first a Philips Evnia 32M2N8900 and in the last 2 weeks an LG UltraGear 39GX90SA-W. I had spent quite a bit of time calibrating the monitors using a Spyder 5 Pro and more recently an X-Rite i1 Display with Displaycal, as soon as I used the Windows HDR calibration app the video would look not much better than a well calibrated SDR image. MadVR software would tweak it a little, but the resulting quality didn't wow me.

Yesterday I found a free programme called ColorControl and had a play, I deleted all my HDR calibrated display profiles and reset my NVIDIA settings to defaults and then created a profile using ColorControl. I then downloaded the BETA version of MadVRhdrMeasure21, reset version 09217 and dropped the files into the older versions folder The difference was pretty stunning, colours popped and the contrast and blacks were fantastic, it has taken a little time to tweak the settings, but am over the moon with the results.

I used the following settings for ColorControl:-

Rendering Intent-Perceptual
Target Gamut-Rec2020
Luminance Max Full Brightness-800nits
Peak Brightness-1300nits
SDR Transfer Function-Pure Power
Gamma-2.4
Maximum SDR Brightness-250

Everything else at defaults and make sure to tick Associate as HDR profile

I am still tweaking MadVR as there are quite a few new settings available in the BETA version.

​

 
I use PotPlayer and was experiencing what looked like excessive film grain, I never had this issue with the older version of MadVR. Switching to the NVIDIA decoder cleared the image up sharp as a tack, as a result was able to turn off pretty much all of the processing features in Mad, will see what needs tweaking with SDR content later.

First time I watched Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom in HDR I was very disappointed, this time around it is a visual treat. Am going to revisit Silo in the near future, my previous settings did not appear to work too well with much of the series in very low light. Three Body Problem seemed very well filmed in HDR and am looking forward to the new series, I am certain that will be another visual treat.
 
Funny you mention that, as I have major issues with many games in HDR on my monitor, but strangely not my TV (both gen 1 QD-OLED panels, calibrated using the Windows 11 tool).

All videos (YouTube, files) look great, and some games like Doom Eternal look fantastic on both monitor and TV out of the box, but two I'm playing lots of currently (Helldivers 2 and Resi 4 Remake) become awful with HDR on when using the monitor, both being washed out with terrible gamma.

I've been using ColorControl to try and resolve it.

I can only think the two screens handle SDR content differently when HDR is turned on, and that some part of the HDR implementation in those games uses SDR. The desktop on the monitor is horribly washed out with HDR on, but on the TV it looks completely fine.

As such I think something in those games is reliant on the SDR configuration of Windows, where the other games that have no issues aren't. This seems a solid theory as the changes I make in ColorControl do nothing to the picture of HDR videos or the games that work fine (peak luminance aside, but drastically alters the presentation of the aforementioned games.

If anyone has any ideas I'd be grateful for some input. I've tried all sorts of Windows/Nvidia settings to no avail, though I'm getting closer with ColorControl.

In the meantime I'll try your ColorControl settings and see how it looks.
 
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The nits settings will need to be altered to your monitor specs, in my case my max full screen HDR is around 780, so I just rounded up to 800, my peak is 1300 nits. I have noticed with video content there is some variance, some seem to like Colour Accuracy set to reference. In some cases if you make a change in the NVIDIA App colour changes seem to stack and a reboot is needed, also switching from HDR to SDR with a video playing can result in signal loss and again a reboot.

It isn't a perfect solution, but with the right settings HDR looks amazing, am revisiting some films that were a visual washout using the Windows solution and a getting great results with a few tweaks.
 
I can't believe how close to perfect primary colours and white this software gets without a hardware colorimeter. I ran my X-Rite i1 Pro with Displaycal and made some slight adjustments to SDR and HDR colour levels, then switched to a reading with HCFR. SDR primary colours and white are all below 3.0 and HDR red is 3.3, green is 3.1 blue and white are below 2.0. I have spent hours running calibration tests with results nowhere as good as this.

I have found out if you make and adjustment to the profiles in ColorConrol or NVIDIA App you have to reboot for the settings to take proper effect, if you don't you end up with a messed up colour space playing videos.
 
Firegod said:
I just set my monitor to DisplayHDR 1000 profile and that does me. :)
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The monitor won't be the issue, it's Windows implementation of how it handles HDR and the HDR calibration tool is next to useless. I then realised just how much colour and contrast I was missing out on, at the end of the day Windows and HDR never blew me away when I first got an OLED. I did think about posting some before and after images, it then dawned on me that the images won't make any difference to how you see the image now.
 
13oots2 said:
The monitor won't be the issue, it's Windows implementation of how it handles HDR and the HDR calibration tool is next to useless. I then realised just how much colour and contrast I was missing out on, at the end of the day Windows and HDR never blew me away when I first got an OLED. I did think about posting some before and after images, it then dawned on me that the images won't make any difference to how you see the image now.
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Ah ok understood. Yeah when gaming it seems fine, but yes I agree, in Windows I turn HDR back off as it always seems pants.
 
Your settings work nicely, certainly for Resi 4. Thanks! Helldivers 2 is still a bit weird, but I can get good results coupling it with RTX HDR.
 
Firegod said:
Ah ok understood. Yeah when gaming it seems fine, but yes I agree, in Windows I turn HDR back off as it always seems pants.
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You should only use HDR if a media player or game is utilising it, Windows isn't really designed with HDR in mind, I always alt Windows B in and out of PotPlayer. I might actually try Cyberpunk later with HDR enabled, have yet to try a game, have been far too engrossed with how good films look.
 
Kirby Wurm said:
Your settings work nicely, certainly for Resi 4. Thanks! Helldivers 2 is still a bit weird, but I can get good results coupling it with RTX HDR.
Click to expand...

You could always try different settings for Helldivers, I only cribbed the settings off a webpage, I think these are more for movies than games. The great thing about ColorControl is that you can rapidly deploy different HDR profiles, you may find a different Rendering intent or Gamma may improve things, it's quick and easy to create a new profile and test it.
 
13oots2 said:
You could always try different settings for Helldivers, I only cribbed the settings off a webpage, I think these are more for movies than games. The great thing about ColorControl is that you can rapidly deploy different HDR profiles, you may find a different Rendering intent or Gamma may improve things, it's quick and easy to create a new profile and test it.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I've been playing around with it.
The fact you can implement changes on the fly is so useful!
 
Kirby Wurm said:
Yeah, I've been playing around with it.
The fact you can implement changes on the fly is so useful!
Click to expand...

Have you tried Reshade? I use it with Borderlands 4 (non HDR) the shaders really made the game visually more intense, cant get the fake HDR selection to work, but am quite happy with the shader the programme installs by default.
 
13oots2 said:
Have you tried Reshade? I use it with Borderlands 4 (non HDR) the shaders really made the game visually more intense, cant get the fake HDR selection to work, but am quite happy with the shader the programme installs by default.
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Yes, I tried it with Resi 4 using the RenoDX plugin, but it didn't quite fix the issues with it on it's own; there was an improvement, but blacks were still raised, and mid tones off. The ColorControl profile looks a lot better, but doesn't pair nicely with the mod.

Might try it with HD2 (from what I've read, the anti-cheat doesn't appear to block it).
 
I use the latest MPC-HC which has the built in MPC Video Decoder which does HDR correctly so no need for MadVR, didn't know about the alternative to Windows HDR Cal though so will give that a try tonight, though I'd not seen any issues with HDR either in TB400 or Peak 1000 on my AW3225.
 
mrk said:
I use the latest MPC-HC which has the built in MPC Video Decoder which does HDR correctly so no need for MadVR, didn't know about the alternative to Windows HDR Cal though so will give that a try tonight, though I'd not seen any issues with HDR either in TB400 or Peak 1000 on my AW3225.
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MPC is great for that. It's only certain games which makes it very frustrating to try and troubleshoot. I recall that in Halo Infinite, with HDR enabled it was the same, yet if I was fullscreen borderless, when it wasn't the active window, HDR was fine, yet switching to it washed it out. At least in that case I was happy to play with a controller on the TV, but HD2 and Resi 4 are two I find much easier with m&kb.
 
mrk said:
I use the latest MPC-HC which has the built in MPC Video Decoder which does HDR correctly so no need for MadVR, didn't know about the alternative to Windows HDR Cal though so will give that a try tonight, though I'd not seen any issues with HDR either in TB400 or Peak 1000 on my AW3225.
Click to expand...

MPC decoder is pretty good, but MadVR is better at contrast and blacks, it takes a fair bit of fine-tuning and certainly isn't switch on and go. Mad can be pretty heavy on the graphics card if it is doing a lot of processing, IMHO it has the edge on visual quality over MPC.
 
I just tried the software and it works really well, thanks for posting it :)

I find mpv player to be pretty good at playing video and HDR content, may not be the best but works well and no install required if needed
 
I definitely prefer the rendering of MadVR to MPC, the blacks are deeper and there is still plenty of detail in the shadows. My monitor is now calibrated using an Xrite i1 Pro, I discovered that the profiles saved by Calibrite Profiler can be edited in ColorControl, colour values remain but the luminance settings need matching to the HDR monitor.

There is little difference in SDR content between MadVr and MPC.



First 2 photos are using MadVR, second MPC, the first and third images are HDR 4k, the second and fourth SDR HDTV.
 
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