The neverending discussions about the the lighting in tsw3, and the issues it has had me thinking. According to my limited knowledge, it looks to me that a lot of the issues could be fixed if TSW would support HDR. As a lot of the issues looks to be the results of trying to mapping wide luminescence range into limited SDR color garmut. Thankfully, TSW being a UE4 game, you can force HDR by a simple engine.ini tweak. For me, it works only in DX11, and if the game is running fullscreen. Code: [SystemSettings] r.AllowHDR=1 r.HDR.EnableHDROutput=1 r.HDR.Display.OutputDevice=5 r.HDR.Display.ColorGamut=2 r.HDR.UI.CompositeMode=1 r.HDR.UI.Level=1.0 Even on my low tier HDR monitor (just 8 vertical dimming zones) it very much improved the look of the new routes and fixed some of the issues, namely: Desaturation of colors during clean days - this is very much reduced in HDR mode. Things are still bright, but they have color. Lights loosing colors in bright day - This is gone. Red light stays red light, green stays green. And I would guess that on a good HDR monitor they would also look properly bright. Ofc, there are some issues, mainly, the HUD and all UI elementes are washed out, and the menus can also be all over the place when it comes to brightness. For me, that is a trade I'm willing to make for a better overall look. There might be other issues in different light conditions, or on older routes... I've obviously not tested everything If you have a HDR monitor, I would definitely recommend you to give it a try. FPS hit is negligible, I'm running on a GTX1080, and the performance is the same in HDR and SDR for me. And before somebody ask, I cannot provide screenshots, as trying to produce a normaln screenshots from HDR content doesn't work, and the colors end up all over the place. And on the end a little plea to DTG. Looks like you've already done all the heavy lifting to make this game look good in HDR, by using the correct luminescence values on your new routes. Both next gen consoles support HDR content, and with the decreasing prices of OLEDs, HDR TVs will soon be standard. Also on PC things are starting to look better in this regard, as the first generation of proper gaming oled monitors are hiting the market right now. Maybe is worth to have a look for proper HDR implementation in TSW.
That will not help, reshade cannot reconstruct information that got lost - the actual color of the signal, nor can it properly identify where light is in the scene and limit changes to that area, nor can it work around the inherit SDR limitations. It ofc can make TSW look better, but in my experience, it usually makes a game look better in certain conditions and worse in another. What I think is the issue with the new lighting engines, is that in normal mode (SDR), the game doesn't control brightness. It just provides color to the monitor. The brightness is uniform throughout the monitor and is controlled by the brightness setting on your monitor. So how do things appear brighter? By using a brighter color (increasing the lightness in HSL), which our brain, in the context of the rest of the scene, interprets as "brighter". The issue is that once everything is bright color, increasing lightness will make the color whitish. Which is the issue we're having right now in TSW. This isn't done by DTG directly, this is done by UE4, once it renders the scene in SDR. Internally (according to DTG) everything is represented as color + luminance. During TSW 3 promos they have mentioned several times that they have reworked the lighting, so it use real world luminance values. Why does HDR help with this issue? Because in HDR every pixel provided to the monitor also has a luminance (brightness) information. So UE4 doesn't have to do the thing that makes lights look white, but rather pass that to monitor. It is then the responsibility of the monitor to show the correct color, with the correct luminance. Why doesn't the monitor make it whitish? Because HDR monitor should be able to vary backlight intensity, thus doesn't have to do the "change the color to perceive brightness" trick. But rather show i.e. fully saturated green but with a stronger backlight. This especially true for OLEDs, where every pixel is a light source.
As an owner of an HDR display, a decent HDR toggle in the game wouldn't go amiss, especially on console where we can't make ini edits. Right now TSW3 looks similar to some games I've experienced with very poor backported HDR implementations. A decent implementation could allow for a proper HDR calibration screen for TSW3 where we can adjust it to our monitors in software via the usual "paper white" and "peak brightness" options and the like.
Is your video card Nvidia or AMD? AMD's control software has an HDR toggle, and I expect Nvidia does too. These override in-game settings.
It's a display technology that allows for higher dynamic ranges to be displayed by the TV/Monitor As is mentioned in the OP, you cannot make screenshots of HDR content, as picture formats cannot store all HDR information - luminance gets lost and the colors get converted to the narrower sRGB color space.
There's the issue, while it's AMD hardware, because every XBox and PS5 is, on console we only get the HDR options they give us. Which for TSW3 is none.
Tried this tweak, disabled autoHDR ion win11, and fullscreen in the game. I now have very crushed blacks and whites. Midrange looks great, very nice saturation in conditions that would be nearly all white previously, but it's hard to read instruments in the shade, and the clouds are near pure white. Can I tweak the transfer function somehow? Edit Setting the UI brightness a little lower greatly reduce the washed out effect in the menus, I use 0.7: r.HDR.UI.Level=0.7 There is some clear limitations in the auto-exposure function here. It seems the auto eye adaptation can't really cope with the higher dynamic range, or it's set wrong. Can we tweak the eye adaptation limits somehow?
On PS5 there is a console setting to force HDR on content thstcdoes not support it. I tried it with TSW2 and it improved the lighting and colours but on TSW3 it makes the game lighting look even worse. Whites go nuclear and black shades are like black holes. When I turn force HDR off to auto, the game looks like it should. It could be the way PS5 forces HDR on content that does not support it.
I sse this a lot, when the transfer function doesn't match the display you get all kinds of weirdness. Sadly a lot of developers seem unaware of colourspaces, transfer functions, signal ranges and how they interact.
Finally got to test it, definitely an improvement, but the effect seems a bit too strong for me, the colours becoming too intense. Is there any parameter that can tweak the HDR strength?
Make sure your display is in the correct mode when HDR is enabled. Most screens have a totally separate setting for HDR, so make sure you're not back to "dynamic" or "vivid" for HDR... I went back to AutoHDR, due to the eye adaptation going a bit overboard in HDR. Overexposed skies and midrange, and shadows on the dark side. Wish he had proper HDR controls. The lowest peak brighness we can set is 1000Nits, and most affordable displays today is way less. My Oled is 650Nits at 10%, but drops a lot with a larger portion of the screen, so I'd think 4-500Nit peaks would look a lot better. Not sure we can tweak the built in HDR profiles in UE4, they seem to be locked at 1000 or 2000nits.
