Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced (PC) HDR Analysis

[KoKlusz]

Technical Info:

• Anvil Engine
• HDR available in the windowed mode
• Ignores peak brightness from EDID/OS calibration
• Possible sRGB/G2.2 EOTF mismatch in HDR

Important

RenoDX mod by Musa

HDR Settings:

Maximum Luminance - Peak Brightness, goes from 300 nits to 4000 nits (default 800)

Exposure - screen brightness, goes from -2 to +2 (default 0)

Review:

Just about everything said about Assassin's Creed Shadows applies here as well:

The game looks very different in SDR compared to HDR, which is apparently common for games using this engine and makes it impossible to match them. By default, the HDR image appears similar to SDR at 300 nits brightness, but with lighter shadows. It seems the game is experiencing an sRGB gamma mismatch, which the developers tried to address in post-processing, but with mediocre results. The colors also appear different, suggesting that the game may use a different tone mapper—or even different LUTs—in HDR mode. The UI brightness peaks at 268 nits, which is certainly an odd value. Setting exposure to -1 seems to bring midtones close to the SDR reference.

The exception that default exposure in HDR is closer to the 200 nits. Lowering exposure too much seems to be washing out near black.

Overall, not the best HDR presentation, but it's serviceable enough.

Comparisons

Warning

In order to view them correctly on Windows, you must use a Chromium browser with Windows HDR enabled and the brightness slider set to the value of 31

SDR Defaults (200 nits, Gamma 2.2)
HDR Defaults

---

SDR Defaults (200 nits, Gamma 2.2)
HDR Defaults