This sim is actually NOT good for HDR… we’ve been begging for calibration in-game settings as the exposure and colors seem to be either overdone or too muted.
Same, I have an HDR10 monitor (Asus PG27UQ) and I love HDR in games that are properly calibrated for HDR. Sure do hope MSFS 2024 has ingame settings to fix the overblown exposure in the sim.
I didn’t know about your tool you created for HDR pics! Thanks!!
In your post above you’ve said nothing about the 0-255 vs 16-235 colorspace settings. That alone is the biggest reason that people complain of washed-out whites or crushed blacks.
It’s not easy to get one’s head around the two different ranges. In an ideal world there should only be one colorspace range. But for historical reasons there are two ranges.
Ps. I was exploring MSFS HDR, colorspace (‘extended’ vs ‘enhanced’ vs ‘standard’ etc) and black-level (‘high’ vs ‘low’) options a couple of weeks ago on my LG OLED TV, connected to the PC via HDMI.
I fell through all the above pitfalls, and finally got it all looking stunning.
I use it too, but as a “triple A” game/sim, there should be calibration menus like every other game has to assist in white balance, saturation, exposure, etc.
I cannot find anything labeled colorspace for the Adrenaline software. A search for colorspace on AMD’s site points me to the Color Depth, for which I am set to the highest 10 bpc, as supported by my display. I do have a Pixel Format Full RGB or Limited RGB that can be selected. Is that related to your 0-255 vs. 16-235?
Windows > System > Settings > Display > Advanced display only states “High Dynamic Range (HDR)” under Color space with no further detail.
Can you elaborate on colorspace as you’re referring to it? Is this something only identified as such by nVidia?
Edit:
If you have “Full” selected in Windows, then you need the matching setting in your monitor (or HDMI connected TV).
And in the monitor you may see that as “Black Level”, which can be set to “Low” or “High”.
So “Full” in Windows needs “Low” black level in the monitor; and “Limited” in Windows needs “High” black level in the monitor.
I think HDR is great when flying at night but I get blown out clouds (too bright) during the day. The fact that its aircraft dependent doesnt help. (The eye adaptation effect is different in each plane).
I originally saw HDR on my PC and was fairly happy with it as I could adjust things with nVidia Control Panel. But then I moved exclusively to XBox and it has banding and odd colors along with the blown out clouds so I use sRGB mode on the monitor and XBX set to 12 bit Full RGB nonHDR 4k at 60Hz and I like it well enough. I don’t have the yellow cloud issues near as much as I used to on my PC and I hope that wasn’t just a seasonal improvement.
But I just discovered my monitor is “VESA Display HDR 400 (1.1)” certified. Its a Benq EX2710Q. Could that be why the clouds are blown out? MS say that DisplayHDR 500 or higher is better.
and does anyone know anything about Dolby Vision? Maybe like there could be just ONE Dolby Vision instead of 4 million HDR standards? Is it better? Does MSFS do it/work with it?
The XBox has it as an option but my monitor is not Dolby capable.
They couldnt make us buy 3D TVs so they got revenge with 4 million standards of HDR.
HDR is a wide and mysterious world of many variables
The main things that define how a given display works in HDR-land are:
maximum brightness in nits or cd/m^2 (these units are identical, adding to the confusion )
contrast ratio between the brightest and darkest displayable bits
how consistently that contrast can be applied across the whole screen (cheaper LCD sets have the same contrast across the screen, expensive sets may have multiple “dimming zones” to show bright and dark areas in separate parts of the screen, and OLED sets have full contrast over every pixel at once)
additionally, bit depth – Dolby Vision can use a more precise 12-bit mode that won’t apply here
The differences between Dolby Vision and HDR10 are mostly in how metadata about the brightness/contrast ranges in the picture is communicated, and Dolby Vision and DisplayHDR both have specific compliance level standards for various sets of capabilities.
For MSFS the most important thing is max brightness, and unfortunately it seems particularly bad among all games at communicating with the display about how bright things should be.
It’s supposed to detect from the TV/monitor’s metadata, and/or any manual calibration, a maximum brightness to output to avoid blowing out the colors, and tone-map everything to fit that. However very often this doesn’t work in MSFS, either at all, or consistently.
The result is that on lower-level HDR displays you often encounter the blown-out brights on the horizon or clouds in daytime (even on the ground in the desert!). Sometimes you can fiddle with fullscreen mode (jump into windowed mode and back) and it helps, other times it just doesn’t.
I really hope this gets more attention in MSFS 2024, both in terms of functionally working right by default consistently and in providing a manual brightness/contrast control which would help so much with peoples’ complaints, both for HDR and non-HDR people.
I didn’t have washed out but it just didn’t look at all natural. Too extreme (kind of blotchy especially in the cockpit).
I’ve been messing with trying to integrate a Elgato PCI Capture Card (thinking it will take the stress off the CPU and let me record full detail + res video, but I could be wrong! I’ve opened yet another can of worms with trying to do that lol). Long story short I had to rewire things, it didn’t work, went back to another arrangement. Better. But noticed with HDMI cable that didn’t work out well (pass through from the Capture card) my screen was detected as 8 bit colour depth. And was limited to 60Hz even though the Elgato has 240Hz pass through.
From the DP port straight to the monitor it’s seen as 10 bit. And since plugging back in this way my fonts are clearer but the overall colour is more “red” now. It actually shifts after getting to desktop from clean colour to almost like a night mode over a few seconds. Weird as it’s essentially the same cabling I had before fitting the Elgato!
Anyway since reading this thread and noticing the change in colour, I just explored the monitors built-in colour modes (it had HDRi options whatever they are. Like fake HDR?) - the other modes it has give me as much control as I want atm and look more like “real world” to my eye. It has like RPG, Racing, FPS (shooter), Cinema, Sports and sRGB. Settled on sRGB. Good contrast, good depth, nice realistic more muted but not dull colour. Still trying to suss if HDRi does anything good for MSFS.
Note that sRGB is the standard colorspace for non-HDR desktops, so an “sRGB” color setting on the TV or monitor should always produce the most accurate color reproduction defaults. (That is, if it still looks wrong it’s the game’s fault. )
I did not have any problem with the Windows HDR Calibration Tool.
HDR looks great in FS2020 after setting it.
“This app lets you calibrate your HDR display to optimize it for HDR games (including Auto HDR) and other HDR content on your Windows 11 PC. Go through a series of steps to set the minimum and maximum brightness levels, as well as color saturation level, to create a new color profile that’s made for your display.”
For me, the Windows HDR calibration tool produced a profile that was not as good as what was installed when I ran Benq’s driver installation file.
sRGB looks best to me. I just don’t understand why ‘DisplayHDR’ which is one of the three HDR modes the monitor has, does not also produce correct colors just with a wider range.
MSFS just truly isn’t ‘HDR compatible’ yet I guess. I hope they both fix it AND provide in sim color adjustment tools.
FYI the 10 I HDR10 refers to bit depth, not brightness.
I’m debating sticking with SDR. Yesterday I noticed some color banding in the clouds, so I thought I switched to SDR at some point for screenshots and forgot to turn it back on. Turns out HDR was on, so I compared back with SDR and don’t think I saw much of a difference. At least nothing to write home about.
I forgot that a 32" screen is 40% larger than a 27" screen (437.6 sq.in. vs. 311.5 sq.in.)