HDR Games in 2023 - A complete analysis (Patreon)

After personally analyzing and testing 178 HDR games from 2017 up to now (both on Xbox and Playstation), it was time to collect the most important KPIs from them in order to better understand the current technical situation of HDR gaming market and how can be leveraged at best when coupled with our TVs.

So let's start with some charts!

As you can see, the majority of HDR games now provide an actual Peak HDR Luminance control (both on system-level and/or in-game), so this means that most of them can be dialed up properly for HGIG (with no tone mapping involved) in order to achieve the most accurate results (in a dark room), but there is also a significant amount of games with no HDR controls/sliders at all (even in recent releases) which automatically invalidates the usefulness of HGIG and requires DTM (Dynamic Tone Mapping) On or Off or similar techniques in order to be adapted at best for the TV in use.

But this is not all, as even among the games that will let you control Peak HDR Luminance there are some cases where actual, real world, results look off with HGIG (e.g. visual bugs, different nits application in-game, dim appearance etc).

The following chart is a summarized representation of my HGIG/DTM recommendations after all these analysis for all these games:

As you can clearly see, there's actually no "Versus" between HGIG and DTM as the absolute best results really depend on a "game-by-game" basis (and for half of the HGIG ones you need to do measurements to know exactly what nits correspond to generic numerical or "steps" values...but don't worry: this is why this Patreon page exists in the first place!), plus for HGIG you also need to play in a dark room for it to have an actual edge.

It is now clearer why TV manufacturers like LG still have Dynamic Tone Mapping enabled by default both in HDR Filmmaker and also HDR Game presets.

In the end, DTM: On is still the most "set it and forget it" option considering:

• It will still look similar to calibrated HGIG (just a bit brighter) when Peak HDR Luminance is set to or close to 4.000 nits + Paper White (or Midpoint) control is set around 200 nits
• HDR Brightness / Black Level set to 48 will compensate the black level raise with DTM: On and also improve/fix night scenes processing
• It will always look better for all those games with fixed Peak HDR luminance, especially the very high ones (2.000-10.000 nits peak)
• It will always look better on dim and bright rooms (so not only in dark rooms)
• It looks even better on 2023 LG OLEDs thanks to the new DTM Pro with 20.000 analysis zones compared to the previous 5.000's, which will result in a much more accurate (and less pronounced/overbright) tone mapping

...but HGIG remains the most accurate and standardized option (in a dark room) for all those games that will let you control Peak HDR Luminance and set it exactly to your actual TV HDR Peak Luminance.

On G3 and 2023 Series is best to avoid Game Mode + HGIG as it will disable the new "Dynamic Color Boosting" technology for preserving higher color luminance and rival QD-OLEDs results.

BONUS DATA

In the table below you can have an overview of the most commonly supported Max Peak HDR Luminance in HDR games so far:

while below you can see more details of the most supported Peak HDR Luminance between HDR games which will let you control them:

• 10.000 nits
• 4.000 nits.
• 2.000 nits

seems che most common.

I hope that this analysis will make you more open minded about the current HDR gaming market situation and also help you to better decide which settings are best for your setup.

Enjoy ;)

-P