HDR10+ PC gaming is coming
Samsung goes big on gaming
IF YOU’VE NEVER been to a television manufacturer briefing, consider yourself lucky. They spend hours trying to sell features you don’t need, running flattering demonstrations against rival panels, and bigging up those picture processing modes we all turn off as soon as we unbox the TV.
I recently went to an event hosted by Samsung, which began with some flogging of the 8K dead horse—8K displays account for just 0.15 percent of TV sales worldwide (see News, page 9). Thankfully, it soon moved on to something people do care about—gaming, and specifically PC gaming. There was a demo of futuristic racer Redout using Samsung’s own HDR10+ standard, thanks to beta drivers provided by Nvidia. Like Dolby Vision, HDR10+ allows content makers to add dynamic metadata to the picture and, as our colleagues at WhatHiFi? found, this makes the resulting image punchier, deeper, and more dynamic. Unlike Dolby Vision, HDR10+ is a royaltyfree open format created by Samsung, and while it sells more televisions worldwide than any other manufacturer, Panasonic and Philips have also adopted the format.
Nvidia’s new drivers allow game developers to perform source-based tone mapping, meaning they can take full advantage of a display’s HDR capability. The Redout demo looked spectacular, although as Samsung noted, game developers will have to learn how to take advantage of HDR10+, meaning adoption could be slow at first. However, it will work with existing GPUs and be compatible with variable refresh rate standards, such as G-SYNC. There is further to go with the tech, as HDR10+ is still limited by the format’s 10bit color format compared to Dolby Vision’s 12-bit, but it’s an impressive step forward.
Samsung also showed off its new gaming hub that will arrive this summer. A big part of this is cloud gaming integration with Stadia, Nvidia GeForce NOW, and Utomik. Samsung showed an impressive Cyberpunk
2077 demo highlighting the improved 100ms latency and 120Hz processing on its latest screens. TV manufacturers see PC gamers as an important market, and we’ll be featuring more on couch-based gaming in MaximumPC shortly.