A few days ago, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim received a substantial visual upgrade with the addition of true HDR support brought by the Community Shaders PC mod, which previously introduced true PBR and frame generation support to Bethesda's best-selling game.
This means anyone who owns an HDR-compatible display will be able to benefit from greatly improved brightness peaks, helping breathe new life into the 2011 game's visuals alongside the other Community Shaders features. The CS team worked with this alongside the folks at HDR Den, including HDR evangelist Filippo Tarpini (whom I previously interviewed at length on the state of HDR gaming) and HDR modder Musa. Tarpini wrote on X:
Me & @MusaRenoDX worked closely with Davo & Doodlum to bring this to life in a process that lasted almost 2 years: the results are absolutely stunning! Skyrim basically didn't do any tonemapping: it simply clipped all highlights. Since the game’s average brightness is very high, a huge amount of the scene could end up clipped at any given time: snow, fire, skies, spells, sky, etc. With HDR, these finally retain detail, showcasing the art as it was made! We also tweaked shadows to keep more detail, without losing contrast (the game clipped a lot of near-black colors due to ancient contrast formulas).
The official feature set of the Community Shaders HDR mod includes:
- Native HDR10 mode.
- Advanced tonemapper courtesy of Musa and the HDR Den, based on the vanilla tonemappers.
- Expanded and configurable peak brightness up to 10,000 nits.
- Paper white slider to adjust the average picture brightness.
- Automatic monitor detection based on RenoDX.
- BT.2020 color space support.
- Deep integration with the upcoming Post-Processing features, which will allow granular control of tonemapping, color-correction, and more.
Of course, you will need to install the base Community Shaders mod first and also enable HDR mode in Windows (preferably using Windows 11).
As with all things HDR, it's impossible to really show the difference unless you are watching on an HDR-compatible display. If you have it, there are eight comparison screenshots available for an easy click-on, click-off comparison at this URL.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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