A brilliant technique for illustrating HDR effects shows you just what’s wrong with HDR in ‘Red Dead Redemption II’.
‘Red Dead Redemption II’ luminance map. Credit: Digital Foundry
Red Dead Redemption II ’s HDR problem has received a good deal of attention lately. Adam Fairclough first brought the problem to light in an article on Eurogamer and now Digital Foundry has created a video that clearly illustrates RDR2 ’s failure to provide HDR support.
In a nutshell, RDR2 sends SDR (standard dynamic range) content to the console and labels it HDR. The SDR content is then processed as if it were HDR by the console and screen. The erroneous processing doesn’t provide any benefit and it may make the image look worse. Here’s a more in-depth explanation including what you can do to fix the problem.
Videos or screenshots of RDR2 ’s HDR failures have to be viewed in HDR to illustrate the problem clearly. That’s difficult because most people don’t access the internet on HDR-capable hardware. Fairclough devised a method for creating luminance maps that show how HDR content is displayed that largely solves this problem. He applied his method to a variety of games in a post on ResetEra.
Luminance is a measure of the light intensity that people subjectively experience as brightness. It’s measured in nits where one nit equals one candela per square meter (1 nit = 1 cd/m2). Fairclough’s method maps nits onto a color scale. Images from a game can then be displayed in the colors that show how brightness differs across the image.
Adam Fairclough’s luminance mapping technique. Credit: Digital Foundry
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey handles HDR beautifully. The picture from Odyssey seen above shows Fairclough’s method applied to a screenshot of Ikaros flying over the island of Kephallonia. Areas of the screen with luminance (brightness) values of 100 nits or less are shown in shades of gray. The yellow areas range between 100 and 500 nits, orange to red represents 500 to 1000 nits shading to 4000 nits for deep pink.
The 100 nit point is important because SDR images generally aren’t mastered for much more than 100 nits. Thus, what you see in shades of gray has approximately the same level of brightness you get from SDR while everything shown in color is additional brightness that’s added by HDR.
‘Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’ luminance map. Credit: Digital Foundry
Check out this luminance map of Odyssey ‘s Kassandra sitting on a wall. Notice the brightness changes along the edges of her face, arm and leg, along with how the brightness of the sky shades from darker in the upper left corner (shown in light orange) to lighter along the middle-right edge (dark orange), and how the hills behind her are darker yet (yellow).
‘Red Dead Redemption II’ luminance map. Credit: Digital Foundry
Compare Kassandra with this screenshot of Arthur Morgan riding through the snow in RDR2. The bright areas of the screen are almost uniformly the same shade of yellow. There’s virtually no variance in brightness once you pass SDR’s 100 nits. It might be argued that uniform brightness makes sense in this scene as a depiction of snow-driven white-out, but if you’ve ever experienced white-out, you know this scene isn’t it. More importantly, the whole game is like this no matter what’s on the screen. Take a look at the picture at the top of the article. It’s all either SDR gray or more-or-less flat yellow.
Luminance map of the ‘RDR2’ HDR calibration screen set to 100 nits, Credit: Digital Foundry
Here’s a luminance map of the RDR2 calibration screen set to the 100 nit value that the game recommends for LCD screens. If you follow the recommendation, you get a pure SDR image that’s all gray.
Luminance map of the ‘RDR2’ HDR calibration screen set to 300 nits, Credit: Digital Foundry
Look what happens when you set the calibration slider to 300 nits, the recommended level for OLED screens. There aren’t any brightness effects on Morgan or in the barn behind him. Everything is either gray or a uniform bright yellow. This isn’t an HDR calibration scale, it’s an SDR brightness control.
You’ll get a much better idea of how Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ’s excellent HDR implementation and Red Dead Redemption II ’s HDR failure look in action by watching Digital Foundry’s video. The treatment of HDR in RDR2 starts at about the 7:36 mark.
As this is written, it’s unknown if Rockstar will fix the problem and provide a proper HDR version of their game. Going forward, however, I don’t expect developers will try to fake HDR again. If they do, Fairclough’s excellent method for clearly illustrating HDR effects is ready and waiting to shed a beautiful light on their trickery.
If you’re interested in Red Dead Redemption II or how to control HDR, here are some articles you might enjoy.
I’m a cognitive scientist, retired professor, musician, gamer, and avid cyclist with a B. A in History, an M. S. in History and Philosophy of Science, and a Ph. D. in Cognitive Psychology. In addition to papers in professional scientific journals, I’ve written the book Nutritio…
Kevin Murnane covers science, technology and video games for Forbes. His blogs are The Info Monkey & Tuned In To Cycling and he’s The Info Monkey on Facebook & @TheInfoMonkey on Twitter.
