Microsoft is bringing Auto HDR gaming to Windows PC

[HEXUS]

Windows Insiders are testing the feature now. Could add HDR to 1000+ DX11/12 PC titles.

Read more.

[Otherhand]

"Darkening shadows"? Have I completely misunderstood HDR? I thought it was supposed to produce a greater range of hues within shadows

[Nifl]

Increasing the dynamic range without remastering the content is extremely difficult and impossible to do without causing unwanted artifacts.
I think this will be a gimmick at best.

Adding HDR to games has been a thing for a while with SpecialK. But sadly it has the huge problem that the entire content is remapped. That includes text and HUD elements... which is terrible in some instances.
Maybe M$ will make it a bit "smarter".

[kalniel]

"Darkening shadows"? Have I completely misunderstood HDR? I thought it was supposed to produce a greater range of hues within shadows

That's more bit depth. HDR is about your total range of luminosities (brightness) - if SDR is 0.1 to 300 nits say, then HDR could be 0.001 to 1000 nits, so you want to stretch out your range of luminosities to go further into the extremes - so making blacks darker, and highlights brighter for eg. Naturally with more spread out luminosities the jumps between levels are greater, so to counter that you may want to use a higher bit depth so that you can describe all those hues in shadows for eg. with smaller steps.

[MaddogPepper]

Increasing the dynamic range without remastering the content is extremely difficult and impossible to do without causing unwanted artifacts.
I think this will be a gimmick at best.

Adding HDR to games has been a thing for a while with SpecialK. But sadly it has the huge problem that the entire content is remapped. That includes text and HUD elements... which is terrible in some instances.
Maybe M$ will make it a bit "smarter".

Having used this on quite a few games now on my Series X (Samsung Q80R TV) I can honestly say its not a gimmick, makes a huge difference to old content. For example Control never had HDR implemented natively but with AutoHDR it looks really good, same with Prey from Arkane Studios. I agree it is not as good as a native HDR implementation, but it does work much better than you might expect.

[Spud1]

OK, I am going to be *that guy* here.

This sounds interesting an all, but I would really appreciate it if they could fix HDR mode in windows first of all, so I don't have to toggle it on and off at an OS level before launching a game. When I first read the title here I hoped they were basically announcing that fix (i.e. automatically toggling HDR on and off depending on the content on screen....like my phone, Xbox or TV does). It's horribly broken right now in windows.

Still, i'll be keen to give this a try and will run the update later....curious!

[kalniel]

OK, I am going to be *that guy* here.

This sounds interesting an all, but I would really appreciate it if they could fix HDR mode in windows first of all, so I don't have to toggle it on and off at an OS level before launching a game. When I first read the title here I hoped they were basically announcing that fix (i.e. automatically toggling HDR on and off depending on the content on screen....like my phone, Xbox or TV does). It's horribly broken right now in windows.

I thought much the same, presumably it's in the queue behind sorting out resolution scaling etc.

[Drago MkII]

This looks like great news to me, auto HDR was one of the features that interested me on the Series X. I just wish they would add more 360 and original Xbox titles to backwards compatibility, there are quite a few that I'd like to play again that aren't on the current list unfortunately. If you could have played any previous Xbox title on the Series X then I probably would have endeavored to buy one by now.