Should I play with HDR, Bloom, or off?

[kijib]

I have no idea what these settings mean/if they are broken or not

[Lucifer69]

None of them, go ENB and profit. Though you need HDR enabled for ENB so HDR wins I guess.

Vanilla, HDR can make whites in game unbearable. You can tone it down with lowering brightness in game and tweaking monitor colors. Bloom can look unrealistic and at times immersion breaking.

Edit: Dynamo and Rudy are honorable mentions. Both are minimal on performance impact and give good tones that don't kill the vanilla atmosphere. Though the performance impact doesn't matter these days on any mid range hardware.

[Vex Hilarius]

If you don't use an ENB, use HDR.

[kijib]

which ENB?

[Lucifer69]

I literally mention which ENB I personally like. There's two I've used. Dynamo and Rudy. Right now, I'm using Rudy.

ENB: http://enbdev.com/download_mod_falloutnv.htm
Dynamo: https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/53521/
Rudy: https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/55076

Edit: Note, only use one ENB at a time... (unless you know what you are doing and can confirm they will work together).

[Yzal]

hdr or nothing. Bloom makes the sky ridiculously shiny, like the sun was placed just over the clouds.

[Lunch-b0x]

One setting that IS broken is Transparency Multisampling. Leave this one turned off if you're going to use MSAA. It will make particle effects and transparent textured items such as fences and grass look terribly flat and ugly, along with giving them a grid line or pixellated appearance.

[Salamand3r-]

Don't use ENB. The NV version is unfinished and has a fair few graphical bugs. I used it for the better part of a decade, and dropping it was the single best thing I've experienced in NV.

Use ReShade for color correction and other effects.

Use HDR, not bloom. There was only a choice for performance reasons back in the day - on any PC less than 15 years old, HDR is the better option.