Gaming in HDR

If there’s anything that proves what a nightmare technology HDR is to wrap one’s gray matter around, it’s surely gaming. After all, PC game developers and graphics hardware vendors have been talking about how great HDR gaming is for years.

But if the first HDR displays are only just emerging now, how could PC games have been HDR for years? The answer to that is actually fairly simple. Some games have been rendering to HDR targets for some time. It’s just the output from the game engine is compressed or tone-mapped down from HDR to SDR format before being sent to the display. So the HDR claims weren’t a lie in strict terms, but it’s questionable just how much benefit internal HDR rendering was when the output and the display technology was all SDR.

Whatever, with the arrival of bona fide HDR display technology, the PC games industry is boning up to support full HDR visuals. In fact, it’s partly being driven by the adoption of HDR technology in the latest round of games console refreshes from Microsoft and Sony.

What’s more, converting an existing SDR PC game to HDR is not a particularly onerous task. Straightforward mapping processes can expand SDR color maps to HDR ranges via algorithmic translation without massive effort. So, there’s a good chance that patches adding HDR support to existing games could become widespread in the near future. Nvidia is reportedly working on an HDR patch for

Rise of the Tomb Raider, for instance. But it will probably be games with console siblings, such as the Forza,

Battlefield, and Gears ofWar series, that will be the first games to get full HDR capability on the PC. It’s also worth remembering that just about anything, be it games or HD video, will look better on a proper HDR display, even if the content itself isn’t mapped for HDR output.