Has anyone EVER got HDR working???

[Piano man]

I have a Samsung CRG9 that is HDR capable. I have had HDR run fine on Watch Dogs Legion, Doom Eternal, God of War (meh... it was okay) but my GOD it looked INCREDIBLE on Days Gone.

I cannot for the life of me get it to work in Hitman 3. YES, I have enabled HDR through Windows settings before opening the game - didn't work. YES, I tried running in 10-bit colour and still it doesn't work. YES, I have enabled and disabled, and then re-enabled it a million times trying to get it to work but every SINGLE time the colours look washed out to all buggery and HDR doesn't work properly.

IN FACT, when I was so annoyed with it - I went on YouTube to try and watch a few HDR videos of Hitman 3 to see if anyone else had it working... and all of them (specifically labelled HDR) show the same image I have - washed out, grey-ish blacks and drab colours... ALL, except for this guy seemingly, where the HDR looks GORGEOUS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-AiLD6lkpk

I've never had this much trouble running HDR in my life. Has there been a single person on Steam who has managed to get it working properly?

[Cheese McQueen]

Hi I've got the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 and it works fine normally. If there is an issue I just restart the PC and its fine. You don't have any overlays running at the same time do you? That can wash out all the colours.

[Piano man]

I think the only one I've ever had is the GeForce Experience fps counter, but that's never interfered with other games HDR. I will investigate this and disable the overlay (and Steam if it isn't already).

Edit: Well, again, enabled HDR in Windows, went into the game - HDR is on and set to the highest level. Here's the weird thing. The HDR option white square seems to prove that HDR is working because it is a BRIGHT, bright white; yet the in game colours are again washed out to all buggery. The Sun on the Dubai mission looks like a perfectly round bright dot in the middle of a grey-brown pale murky sky. It looks not even remotely like the above video.

It ends up looking like this (scroll to 6:07 and watch in HDR)
https://youtu.be/34q7iAaM8Fo?t=367

[Death Korps of Krieg]

I have a triple Samsung G7 Odyssey setup, for almost a year now,
And in all honesty, i can count the amount of games i succesfully had HDR working in, on one hand.

at first i thought it was due to the low HDR peak briightness of my own monitors, rated at 600 peak brightness. but i see alot of others with higher peak brightness monitors have similar issues.

HDR is one of these gimmicks that "When it works" it is phenomenal and undescribeably better, (best example with doom eternal), but then you realize there barely really is any HDR content availble in general.

---

So about a year ago when i just bought the monitors, i was experimenting alot more with it,
Something i highly recommend is this third party program named "Special K"
Which specializes in creating an API to make older games work in HDR.

I have not tested this out with Hitman 3 specifically, but in my experiments with this program it did gave me alot more options to customize the effects of HDR,


https://wiki.special-k.info/HDR/Retrofit

---

Its also a pity that we can't use ReShade when HDR is enabled.

[Piano man]

I have heard of Special K, and while it does its best to 'emulate' the HDR experience, it is a slightly fake one that doesn't work as well. Tried experimenting with it a while ago after Digital Foundry did a video on it - wasn't completely impressed compared to proper native HDR... but thanks for taking the time to suggest it to other people who may be interested to give it a try.

[Piano man]

Well, it's been a while and after a bit of research - I have a sort of fix, for those whose HDR looks brown and washed out like mine.
If you have an Nvidia card - put HDR on in windows, start Hitman 3 with HDR on, and then once you're in game - enable Nvidia freestyle by pressing Alt + F3. Add the filter 'brightness and contrast', then change the sliders to these settings.

Exposure - 33%
Contrast - 15%
Highlights - 33%
Shadows - 50%
Gamma - 0%.

Makes a HUGE difference in Dubai. I'm still playing around with the settings and sliders, but hope this helps show off your monitors true colours.

BEST THING IS, you don't have to enable this every time you start Hitman - just the one time and then each time you open up the game, it should automatically remember the settings for that application.

[SeeNoWeevil]

When people say HDR is 'not working' in Hitman, what they really mean is 'I don't like the colour grading IOI chose'.

[Piano man]

No... it looks desaturated, washed out and it looks like there's a brown filter over everything.

The Sun looks like a perfect circular globe in the sky. That's not how light works, and their implementation of HDR was rather poor. I've spent hours researching through the internet and everyone is saying the same thing. They never got it to work natively, so we have to use these cheats to fix what IO broke.

And to prove you are wrong, IO even state in their Support pages that it's an 'outstanding issue'. They haven't gotten it to work properly since Hitman 2, so don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ me.

I suspect they've given it the same treatment and attention they did their VR implementation - ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lousy.

[SeeNoWeevil]

Originally posted by Piano man:

No... it looks desaturated, washed out and it looks like there's a brown filter over everything.

The Sun looks like a perfect circular globe in the sky. That's not how light

You don't understand HDR. The sun is 1.6 billion nits, does your display reach 1.6 billion nits? No, of course it doesn't, which is why developers have to make artistic decisions on how to tonemap this massive range of brightness into a much more reasonable range that can be displayed by current displays. This usually involves a combination of clipping the brightest portions of the image and compressing the rest. You can't have all the detail of the sun visible without sacrificing the overall brightness of the scene, pick your poison.

The reason people complain is because IOI chose to make H3 levels more muted and natural looking (SDR has the same presentation) compared to 1 and 2 which are incredibly contrasty and vibrant. A bunch of people hated this which is expected as a lot of people seem to want everything HDR to look like a fairground. It is however, not *broken*. The game sends a HDR image to your monitor, yes?

It's fair enough to say you don't like it (I'm not a huge fan of the way some parts of H3 are presented) but calling it broken is just confusing. Before I bought the game I thought HDR was actually broken due to posts like this, it isn't. The fact you used a filter to tweak things to your liking proves my point.

[Piano man]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1t8SpoW96k

https://www.reddit.com/r/HiTMAN/comments/uxcck0/is_there_a_reasonfix_to_hdr_looking_so_bad_in/

Don't lecture me about how HDR works - I'm very aware of how it works. It works perfectly well in Watch Dogs: Legion, Days Gone and Doom Eternal.

Yes, it technically sends a HDR signal to the monitor but everything ends up looking brown, pale and completely hideous. There are MULTIPLE threads, reddit posts about this which a lot of people pissed off about hitmans dodgy HDR implementation.

At least with the Freestyle settings, you can get it looking at lot closer to the colour saturation and presentation of SDR, but with the benefit of the added brightness from light sources like the sun.

SDR does NOT have the same presentation as HDR, not even close - the colours are completely different, the saturation is all wrong in HDR.

From the actual Hitman 3 support site:

Originally posted by SeeNoWeevil:

HDR
We’re aware of reports that the HDR implementation isn’t optimal on some setups.
→ Status: Tracked.

https://ioisupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019127718-HITMAN-3-Known-Issues

Don't lecture me about whether it works or not - a LOT OF PEOPLE have voice their annoyance at this. The fact that I had to use a filter to tweak the settings means IOI did a piss-poor job of trying to match the presentation of how SDR and HDR looked.

[SeeNoWeevil]

Originally posted by Piano man:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1t8SpoW96k

https://www.reddit.com/r/HiTMAN/comments/uxcck0/is_there_a_reasonfix_to_hdr_looking_so_bad_in/

Don't lecture me about how HDR works - I'm very aware of how it works. It works perfectly well in Watch Dogs: Legion, Days Gone and Doom Eternal.

Yes, it technically sends a HDR signal to the monitor but everything ends up looking brown, pale and completely hideous. There are MULTIPLE threads, reddit posts about this which a lot of people pissed off about hitmans dodgy HDR implementation.

At least with the Freestyle settings, you can get it looking at lot closer to the colour saturation and presentation of SDR, but with the benefit of the added brightness from light sources like the sun.

SDR does NOT have the same presentation as HDR, not even close - the colours are completely different, the saturation is all wrong in HDR.

From the actual Hitman 3 support site:

Originally posted by SeeNoWeevil:

HDR
We’re aware of reports that the HDR implementation isn’t optimal on some setups.
→ Status: Tracked.

https://ioisupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019127718-HITMAN-3-Known-Issues

Don't lecture me about whether it works or not - a LOT OF PEOPLE have voice their annoyance at this. The fact that I had to use a filter to tweak the settings means IOI did a piss-poor job of trying to match the presentation of how SDR and HDR looked.

What you're completely missing out from all the complaints is that they *only* apply to the Hitman 3 maps, which IOI have made *deliberate* changes to how they're presented. You might not like these changes but they are not by any stretch of the imagination *broken*. You can't *fix* broken HDR with a reshade filter.

If HDR looks *completely* different to SDR then your display is probably set to the wrong colourspace or just has a lousy, inaccurate HDR mode.

[Piano man]

No - they apply to all maps in the Hitman 3 application (so it applies to all Hitman 1,, 2 & 3 maps).

My HDR isn't set to an incorrect colourspace because as I said, it looks perfect in other games and I even downloaded some Samsung HDR samples just to verify and they look extraordinary.

I don't have a wrong colourspace and there's nothing wrong with my HDR, so please don't lecture me like I'm some simpleton who doesn't know how to use his computer. I'd show you the video but Nvidia are still trying to fix their issues with Shadowplay and HDR videos being blown out when recorded. Till then, I can't show you what the issue is.

All I know is that Freestyle fixes it. It's like the game has been coded with HDR in mind and all the light sources are programmed fine, but nothing is being displayed above say 200 nits. Freestyle recognises those light sources and you can bump up the exposure and luminance so that they emit a lot more brightness like they would in real life.

Maybe you're one of the very few people who magically have it working correctly, but the forums are full of people still pissed off about this game and its lousy (native) HDR capabilities.

[Xengre]

Originally posted by SeeNoWeevil:

When people say HDR is 'not working' in Hitman, what they really mean is 'I don't like the colour grading IOI chose'.

You're mistaken. HDR, in fact, acatually does not work correctly in Hitman 3. You can verify this testing levels from Hitman 2, for instance, like the race track that work in Hitman 2 but do not work in Hitman 3. Its a bug IO has explicitly acknowledged around release that they're "working on fixing" and have never, ever, made progress on fixing.

[Piano man]

Originally posted by Xengre:

Originally posted by SeeNoWeevil:

When people say HDR is 'not working' in Hitman, what they really mean is 'I don't like the colour grading IOI chose'.

You're mistaken. HDR, in fact, acatually does not work correctly in Hitman 3. You can verify this testing levels from Hitman 2, for instance, like the race track that work in Hitman 2 but do not work in Hitman 3. Its a bug IO has explicitly acknowledged around release that they're "working on fixing" and have never, ever, made progress on fixing.

I'm glad someone else finally acknowledged and confirmed this. While most game companies who do offer HDR usually do a damn good job, not every single game that claims to have HDR gets it working correctly.

RDR 2 is another game where Rockstar have been rather lackluster in their implementation. While I think they fixed it with the PS5 (eventually), it hasn't been properly fixed for PC players.

[Death Korps of Krieg]

Tempting to buy an PS5, just to experience HDR... i barely ever hear any stories about HDR not working with consoles.

Makes me wonder why that is the case that it works so much better with Consoles than PC's

[Xengre]

Originally posted by TheProScout:

Tempting to buy an PS5, just to experience HDR... i barely ever hear any stories about HDR not working with consoles.

Makes me wonder why that is the case that it works so much better with Consoles than PC's

You can try Windows 11 and see if that works. I don't have Win11 yet, just Win10, but I've seen some reports while built in HDR does not work the Win11 auto HDR same as on Xbox works with the game from some users.