I have never used an HDR display before so I’m not sure how it’s supposed to look.
I have been playing Spider-man both with and without HDR and unless I’m staring right into the sun there is literally no difference. I have always heard people talk about HDR as something incredible but I’m honestly disappointed.
I also played Tetris effect: connected and HDR seemed to just make all the menus darker, but the rest looked the same.
Have I done something wrong or is this how it is supposed to be?
HDR stands for high dynamic range. It means you can have detail in shadows and highlights without losing detail in the middle.
At the end of the day, it’s just how your computer or console talks to the display. It doesn’t change what your display is capable of. It can’t magically make colors more vibrant, for example. What it does instead, with a quality display, is allow you to make specific colors more vibrant while keeping their detail, without losing it elsewhere. It should usually be subtle, except in specific showcases designed to push the edges of what HDR can do.
It also doesn’t make a mediocre display not mediocre. If it can’t accurately present the whole range, receiving it doesn’t help a lot.
Edit: oh, didn’t realize this is the steam deck sub. You probably can get actual feedback on the quality of the display, then. But it will still really only make a difference to quality if the developers made a specific effort to utilize it. Realistically, that’s mostly on high quality lighting the steam deck can’t really do.
Yeah, the difference should be easily visible assuming one has quality source material and a nice display. I was kind of assuming OP was talking about using the Steam Deck in docked mode, but maybe that was a bad assumption.
Sorry I should have been more clear. I’m using the steam deck oled with the regular display, not an external display.
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Someone else said the actual OLED doesn’t support it. I never paid attention because I talked myself out of needing one, but if that’s the case you obviously wouldn’t see it on the deck screen.
I think you’d run into the limitations of render quality for most stuff 3D, though. There might be 2D games that play with it, and I’m guessing there are demo videos. I know my first (non-HDR) OLED I enjoyed trying some OLED demo clips out to really see what it could do.
The oled deck does support hdr, dont know why some people are claiming ut doesn’t.
General HDR is not supported in Linux yet though, only in games. So videos are unfortunately not a thing I can use for comparison.
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To be clear, you’re not going to find many displays that can reach 4,000 nits yet. A lot of HDR content actually is mastered for 1,000 nits and that’s considered kind of the target for the mid-high range OLEDs right now. My pretty much top of the line QD-OLED Samsung S95C maxes out at something like 1350 nits. A 1000 nit capable Steam Deck OLED has plenty of range in luminance for HDR to be effective there. And I’m sure it’s got pretty good color reproduction which is the other big aspect of HDR.
One thing we haven’t talked about is the possibility that the Steam Deck is enhancing SDR content with dynamic tone mapping to such a degree that it’s difficult to tell the difference when you actually enable true HDR. I’d really have to see this with my own eyes to be able to say with more certainty what’s going on.
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Thanks for the input. I got confused when people said Tetris effect looked “sooo much better” with HDR and I wasn’t seeing any difference at all.
HDR, from what I loosely understand, is related to the color gamut (the reds, greens, and blues) the display can produce. The sRGB coverage used on most displays today is the BT 709 standard. HDR is the newer DCI-P3 standard, and it covers a wider range of colors.
But that’s why games and systems that don’t support those extra colors won’t give you any extra “oomph” on an HDR display (because it’s only coded to utilize the capabilities of an SDR display).
I recommend this article for further reading: https://tomshardware.com/news/what-is-hdr-monitor,36585.html
HDR is actually the BT.2020 color gamut. Films mastered in HDR typically use DCI-P3 because that’s the standard for theaters, but it’s a smaller color gamut than BT.2020, which is what even HDR10 (the most common form of HDR with the lowest specs) supports.
The article I cited says that modern HDR hardware can’t actually reach BT.2020, though that’s the ultimate goal.
Has that changed?
No, it can’t. Most hardware is targeting DCI-P3 (though some goes beyond it) because that’s what films are targeting in the mastering process, but HDR10 and all other HDR protocols (HDR10+, Dolby Vision, etc) all use the BT.2020 spec on the software side of things.
In other words, the software is ahead of the hardware for now.
I still don’t know how my HDR works or if. I feel like every time it’s enabled it looks weird. Maybe because it’s different, or maybe i’m doing it wrong but it’s to much of a hassle to play with the settings. I feel like on the tv it’s a bit different where i think it looks better.
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If nothing else it should make the screen a heck of a lot brighter, max brightness is limited to 600 nits with SDR content but goes up to 1000 nits with HDR. For comparison, the LCD deck peaks at around 400, while this is 1400 from a 32" monitor.
Might also require correct HDR settings from the game to work properly? Not sure, don’t have one myself.
