The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered (PC) HDR Analysis

[KoKlusz]

Technical Info:

• REDengine 3
• HDR available in the windowed mode (no in-game toggle, depends on the system setting)
• Ignores peak brightness from EDID/OS calibration
• No apparent sRGB/G2.2 EOTF mismatch in HDR

HDR Settings:

• Max Monitor Brightness - peak brightness, minimum value is 300 nits, maximum value is 4000 nits, defaults to 500 nits

• Paper White - screen brightness, minimum value is 100 nits, maximum value is 500 nits, defaults to 300 nits

• Saturation - saturation boost, minimum value is 0, maximum value is 1, defaults to 0.20

Review:

CDPR's struggle with HDR continues. For the Remaster, one of the promised features was enhanced HDR, but in practice, it actually regressed compared to the already funky implementation the game had since the Next-Gen update.

One of the reasons for this is that the studio has once again decided to follow the latest trends and implement the AgX tonemapper in place of the Uncharted 2 tonemapper the game original used. This results in several problems that are visible in the SDR presentation already (like hue shifts originally baked into assets, e.g., pink fire), but for our purposes, the most important thing is that it does not support HDR out of the box, the curve is SDR-only.

The curve can be replaced/extended to add HDR support, however as we saw with Control Resonant last week, this seems to be arcane knowledge, as CDPR as well elected to just use inverse tonemapping (AutoHDR). Except even here mistakes were made: the ITM is too aggressive, resulting in overbrightened midtones and clipped highlight detail at the higher peak brightness even versus the SDR presentation.

I really hope that those two releases aren't a sign of things to come. It seems like this year we have finally started to come out of the HDR dark ages, but if the AgX + ITM setup is to proliferate (or Filmic ACES + ITM in the case of Unreal Engine), I see no reason to bother at all.

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 (300 nits, Gamma 2.2)
HDR Max Monitor Brightness 300
HDR Default
HDR Max Monitor Brightness 1000

[polly125]

whats worse is the paper white value is actually 1.5x of the value shown

[musicarch66-collab]

When are we gonna get proper hdr games with intentional use of the dynamic range and wider color gamut.