Enable HDR auto-switching in Forbidden West (Windows)

[BestGermanEver]

I searched around and could not find this topic posted, hope I did not miss anything anywhere - but here we go with the HDR complaint .

I am a big fan of HZD / HFW and and wondering why you at Guerilla or rather Nixxes Software do not have an auto HDR switch in your game?

Feature Request:

Add an Auto-HDR switch when the game detects the Display/Render Hardware is capable of HDR and remember player setting HDR rendering "on" in Display options - ie the game switches HDR on when starting (if "HDR rendering" is selected by player) and switches HDR to off again on exit, if HDR was off when entering game.

Now there will be those who would you ask: why can you not manually switch to HDR, use the game bar or just keep HDR on all the time?

Everyone has their reasons. Mine are: HDR and Windows Desktop plain suck. It messes up most "SDR" app color spaces, makes fonts look weird in Windows and many more things. Safe to say you should probably only use HDR in dedicated apps/for dedicated uses (like Video Editing, Graphics etc.) - TLDR: most people won't use HDR when not full screen gaming / editing etc.

In short, specifically for Horizon: Forbidden West:

- It's a nightmare to use HDR in Windows "desktop" just for Horizon Forbidden West to pickup HDR rendering capabilities. The game will also perma-switch-off prior set HDR should you forget to activate HDR before starting the game... even worse. Ie it will revert back to SDR only rendering.

- HZD I believe had this capability natively, so wondering why you would not have it present in the successor. Looking at you, Nixxes Team?

- Many other games can do it (RE games, Destiny, etc.), you are a AAA studio asking for full price from the consumer - so it would go a long way towards player appreciation across all the hardware options - and I do believe HDR is more widely used in the PC space in 2024 moving away from "early adopters" to more mainstream across the board. It doesn't seem an "insurmountable" task for a dev team to look into adding this natively in your app - although I appreciate it being non-trivial surely for the plethora of PC platforms/hardware combos and last not least OS being Win or Linux.

Here's to hoping your team can look into adding HDR in-game switching (and switching off after the game is quit!) in a future update patch.

It would be much appreciated I'm sure not only by me but others using HDR displays to save themselves from the manual switcharoo (which is still not convenient, game bar HDR functionality or not)

[Midnight Aurais]

your barking at the wrong tree bark at microsoft about it

and when microsoft finally addresses it you will start dealing with hdr monitors not switching right because they try to find solutions to the problem aswel that microsoft ain't fixing

also just learn windows+alt+b to switch to hdr before you launch a hdr compatible game honestly i am running hdr 24/7 and used hdr calibration tool of windows to saturate it more and if that ain't enough then just use the color controls in your videocard drivers

[Ext3h]

Originally posted by BestGermanEver:

HDR and Windows Desktop plain suck. It messes up most "SDR" app color spaces, makes fonts look weird in Windows and many more things

Sorry to tell you, but that really ain't Microsofts fault, at all. The way Windows is translating SDR content for an HDR screen is mathematically accurate, and the perfectly sane way to do. Microsoft even gives you that neat little slide to decide which brightness level you want to correspond to "100%" for SDR.

The actual problem you are facing is: Your monitor claims to speak HDR10, but fails to comply to the HDR10 specification. You can try and go through the monitor menus and disable all "image enhacement" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (especially dynamic contrast "enhancements" of any kind are a big no-no when using HDR10 protocol and absolutely destroy translated SDR contents!), but even then chances are good that your monitors builtin gamma curves and color mapping are just way, waaaaayyyyy off.

You don't even want to know just how many monitor vendors went and gave their monitor support for HDR10 as a pure marketing stunt, without even remotely trying to actually stick to the specification. And likewise, for just how many monitor models Windows 11 has by now blacklisted HDR10 support entirely, because the monitors are behaving so weird (dynamic "enhancements"...) that even any form of calibration attempt fails for them.

So yeah, do yourself a favor and just don't use HDR on that monitor, unless you get it at least so far under control that it would at least pass the Windows 11 builtin calibration and becomes able to render SDR content. When it can't even do that, HDR content ist not going to look even remotely as it should either.