The HDR Gaming Interview – Veteran Developer Explains Its Sad State and How He’s Coming to Its Rescue

Nearly ten years ago, I wrote an opinion piece about HDR gaming being the most groundbreaking feature of the upcoming PlayStation 4 console refresh, then known as 'PS4K' and later released on November 10, 2016, as the PlayStation 4 Pro. Initial information suggested that it would deliver HDR support, unlike the base PS4 model; however, Sony later rolled it out for regular PlayStation 4 consoles as well.

These specifics aside, the article's core foundation was the belief that HDR gaming was poised to be the next big thing in computer graphics, even more so than 4K (Ultra HD) resolution. There was plenty of evidence to support that being true. Microsoft and AMD had already proclaimed that initial user surveys suggested HDR would be revolutionary and even more impactful than higher resolution. Additionally, unlike rendering a game at a higher resolution, HDR would not negatively impact performance.

Those first few years were indeed highly promising. Leading game developers like Naughty Dog and Playground Games publicly stated that HDR support would be 'an enormous benefit' and something that 'could not be unseen'. At CES 2017, NVIDIA announced its G-SYNC HDR monitors, allowing gamers to enjoy both G-SYNC and HDR support in their games. In July 2018, console manufacturers like Microsoft and Sony, display manufacturers like ASUSTek, HP, LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Toshiba, and Vizio, and game developers like Activision, CAPCOM, EA, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, SIE, Square Enix, Ubisoft, Vicarious Visions, and WB Games founded the HDR Gaming Interest Group, or HGiG, to optimize content for viewers.

Everything appeared ready for the HDR revolution, and yet, fast-forwarding to the sad state of the present day forces us to analyze what went wrong. At the end of 2025, now that practically every display you can buy supports HDR in some capacity, some high-profile games still ship without supporting the feature. This year, that was the case with Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, Hades 2, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, ARC Raiders, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (which later received an HDR patch).

It is a literal slap in the face to all those consumers who bought cutting-edge HDR displays capable of achieving peaks of over 2K nits, or candela per square metre, the unit of luminance, whereas Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) displays are stuck at 100 nits. That's not to mention the vastly inferior Rec. 709/sRGB color formats compared to Rec. 2020, which is capable of displaying a much wider color gamut.

Despite this massive technical difference, the overall perception is that nowadays, most developers don't care at all for it. Even those games that technically support the feature often deliver subpar implementations that only serve to tarnish HDR's reputation. One recent example is Silent Hill f, where HDR apparently lacks the color grading the developers had prepared for SDR (which was the internal development reference), resulting in a wildly different look.

I have been in contact with fellow graphics programmer Filippo Tarpini, an industry veteran who has worked at FireSprite and Remedy. At the latter studio, he worked on the Control HDR mod (on his own time, and his work was later implemented with an official patch), as well as on Alan Wake II's HDR implementation. He also created the Luma HDR mod for Starfield and other games, like Prey and Hollow Knight: Silksong. Recently, he founded Gamma Studios, a small company dedicated to helping game studios 'improve their post-processing pipelines, implement HDR output, and do modern color grading'.

While he cannot discuss some of the game projects he has worked on lately, he is also working with NVIDIA to integrate HDR into the RTX Remix game remastering platform. Given that Tarpini is one of the foremost experts on the topic (he also co-established the HDR Den community dedicated to fixing and improving HDR in PC games, and contributed to the addition of HDR to Skyrim), I asked him to chat openly about what's wrong with HDR gaming and what needs to be done to make it shine as bright (literally and figuratively) as it can.

Do note that all of the images included in this article, except for the Just Cause 3 comparison below, are not actually captured in HDR; they are only meant to convey the concept of an HDR scene being brighter and more lively than the SDR equivalent, but the only way to judge HDR for yourself is to watch properly tuned content on a display with at least decent HDR capabilities.

Hello, Filippo. Tell us a bit about yourself.

After years in game development, my focus shifted towards a widely overlooked part of games: tonemapping and grading. Besides having a passion for good looking games, there's literally a hole in this industry where the knowledge for the final parts of "rendering" is scarce and full of misinformation. So I'm trying to come to the rescue of HDR gaming, given that it really deserves to be given more attention.

What is the state of HDR gaming at the end of 2025, in your opinion? Is there a gaming platform that fares slightly better, or are they all at the same level?

I'm sorry to start on a negative note… Let’s just say that out of 25 of the biggest and best games of 2025, half of them don't support HDR and with just a few exceptions, the other half have major defects, like crushed or raised blacks, distorted color hues, clipped or limited highlights, lack of proper calibration settings, bad UI, etc.

In almost all cases, it's clear the game was made on and for SDR, with HDR being an afterthought that only occasionally represents the artistic direction, as it’s easy to tell when SDR was the visual reference, based on its visual consistency. Regarding platforms, there’s usually no difference; almost all games have the same exact HDR implementation.

I personally prefer Sony’s approach over the Microsoft one, but there’s no clear winner. Windows is fine too when it comes to displaying HDR content. The Switch 2’s HDR implementation doesn’t seem to be up to standard; however, I haven’t analyzed it myself, so I can’t really judge it.

Why do game developers neglect HDR even when most displays and monitors nowadays ship with HDR capabilities? Is it that troublesome to implement?

I’m not too sure about the state of HDR in monitors as of 2025, as there have been a fair amount of “fake” HDR ones that kinda ruined its reputation in the past; however, most non-entry-level TVs now ship with good to decent HDR! I’ve been trying to get hold of this data, but nobody seems to be tracking it. It’s at least clear that OLED is becoming the new golden standard for mid to high-end displays.

I believe that somehow gamers aren’t aware of the value HDR adds to the gaming experience. Marketing pushes you to care about having the hottest GPU, but nobody is advertising HDR, given there's no single producer behind it. GPU manufacturing companies often approach game studios with proposals to implement Ray Tracing or features exclusive to their GPUs, but none of that happens for HDR. For the reasons above, developers are under the impression that HDR is a niche technology and isn’t worth the effort. As of late 2025, that stance is very outdated!

That said, if you know what you are doing, no, adding HDR is not hard, but it depends on how flexible your game engine is. I’ve seen engines that were very friendly towards adding HDR, and some that weren’t. In Unreal and Unity, which power most current games, enabling HDR is as easy as toggling a checkbox; however, both have major faults in their implementations. Ultimately, it comes down to whether a studio has anybody passionate about post-processing and encoding (‘gamma’); that doesn’t seem to be very common, though development time constraints also play a role.

As a professional game developer, what was your experience when trying to push for more attention in this specific area?

It varies a lot. On average, I would say the care for it is still very low, while the misconceptions are high. A big obstacle with implementing HDR in games is that… they work even without it! All games are essentially starved of budget and development time, so if anything isn’t essential, it doesn’t get added until as late as possible. It’s unclear how much HDR influences sales, but certainly not by a huge margin, so most devs leave it to the last minute, sometimes even adding it post-launch.

Now, why HDR isn’t considered “essential” is a different story. I’ve certainly been confused by the care studios' focus on Ray Tracing and other graphical features that arguably have less impact and are harder to implement, while completely ignoring HDR. When I talk to fellow devs, I feel there’s often a bad feeling towards HDR, as if they were scared of adopting this new technology, away from something they are used to. They often have the misconception that SDR was perfectly standardized while HDR is a hot mess.

Nothing could be further from the truth. SDR, as we know it, was never standardized in either brightness or transfer function, so each TV/Monitor will look very different. Ironically, most common problems with HDR implementations stem from issues with SDR that were carried over due to misinterpretations of its standards. There’s a big disconnect between color standards on paper and what display manufacturers have actually been following for years. These issues went unnoticed for 20 years due to devs being unable to analyze the results from outside of the SDR ecosystem.

Is there one triple-A game (that you didn't work on) that does HDR really well by default?

I quite enjoyed the HDR in Dead Space and Red Dead Redemption II. When examining them technically, with a 2025 eye, they both have defects here and there, but they still manage to achieve a good result, partially due to the strong artistry behind them. I believe that with a bit more work, they could have gone down in history for their impressive HDR and even improved the reputation of the technology.

I think some of Sony's AAA games and Call of Duty games also have good HDR, though I haven't played any recently. What I can say, at least, is that these games will look as intended in HDR, because the teams behind them test and carefully balance it.

Now that you run a company to aid developers with HDR, do you think the HDR Den and Luma helped in getting others to know your work?

Yes. The HDR Den is still expanding a lot. We recently opened our Reddit (r/HDR_Den), with the intent of helping both gamers and developers find information on this "obscure" technology. We got quite a few game developers in the Discord, and there are often interesting technical discussions. We've all been sharing information, and that basically means we can learn much faster than any actual AAA studio could, given we have 5-10 dedicated modders researching this topic night and day, testing things left and right, and sharing the conclusions from their research.

You can't really find this information elsewhere unless you spend months on it yourself. It needs to grow on you organically over time; hence, unless companies have a passionate employee dedicated to post-processing (color grading, tonemapping, etc.) full-time, there’s very little chance they will pull it off successfully. So much can go wrong, and so easily! And that’s what Gamma Studios is all about: I aid developers in implementing or improving HDR in their games, or anything else that has to do with post-processing.

I was indeed contacted by some developers for my work at Remedy and on Luma; however, much of it is also due to me sharing my work on social networks, Reddit, etc. Because of its popularity, my most requested product is my Unreal Engine HDR improvement package. A few games also used the “Luma” open license code and shipped with it! Even Luma is stronger than ever. Recently, a few amazing devs joined the project and pulled off new amazing mods, like a unified mod that turns the TAA implementation of all UE4 games into DLSS/FSR. We recently designed a new way of patching game shaders directly in memory, opening the door for more advanced modding than was ever possible before.

What else can be done to increase awareness of the potential benefits of well-crafted HDR in gaming?

Besides Dolby or Samsung pushing their exclusive HDR technologies (Dolby Vision/HDR10+), or me posting pro-HDR content left and right, there’s not much happening at the moment.

Let’s start from the current situation. Smartphones have fantastic HDR, iPhone videos and photos are now in HDR, and many of the shorts uploaded on Instagram and YouTube are also in HDR. But when it comes to computers, it’s pretty much a disaster:

• We have half of the monitors with “fake” HDR panels, looking worse than SDR.
• We have Windows showing SDR content in HDR in a “broken” way (all colors are off).
• We have Windows upgrading SDR content to HDR (AutoHDR) using an improper formula.
• We have the two major game engines not doing HDR properly out of the box.
• We have YouTube taking a week to publish a video that was uploaded in HDR.
• We need mods like RenoDX or Luma to fix the HDR in most games.

Similarly, movies are not doing much better either; in fact, they might even be doing worse. HDR in movies is often literally SDR in an HDR container, or barely 10% brighter than SDR. All of the above damage the reputation and awareness of HDR. So what could be done?

Sony and Microsoft could push developers to use proper encoding and calibration techniques, making these practices part of their quality assurance for games released on their platforms. Stop spreading sRGB, given it’s an abandoned standard. TV manufacturers should more often contact developers for collaborations. A consortium needs to be started to define how games should implement HDR and standardize a set of features.

For example, if the brightness calibration were standardized at the OS level, games wouldn’t need to implement individual calibration menus. Game reviewers could start discussing the HDR implementation and criticizing it when it falls short or is not satisfactory. Spreading the word to the next person on how amazing HDR is.

I strongly believe that in 5 years, people will struggle to play SDR games, as they will look so bad (flat) in comparison to the new ones. There’s no going back! Essentially, every game that comes out with broken HDR will be stuck playing in an inferior way in the future, which makes me quite sad.

The HGiG format was established to promote and standardize HDR gaming. However, calibration settings in games are often very different, and it can be confusing for users to navigate this stuff. Should HGIG (or some other subject) do more in this regard?

HGiG is a passive standard: it’s simply making the TV reproduce an image as it came from the source (e.g., PC/PS5), without altering its average or peak brightness, etc. The alternative to HGiG is dynamic tonemapping, which I think has mostly been surpassed by now.

So, calibrating HDR gaming would actually be an extremely simple thing. I think that most devs are scared of that and often overthink it, causing more confusion than anything. All you need is a game scene and UI brightness sliders. The peak brightness of the display can (and should) be retrieved from the OS. The Alan Wake 2 calibration menu does exactly that, and so do my mods.

We have some games that expose 5 or 6 sliders to users (exposure, HDR average brightness, HDR shadow, HDR highlights, contrast, saturation), allowing users to completely change the look of the game, without a clear indication of how the game is meant to look. I believe these “extended” calibration menus are a consequence of devs being under the misconception that HDR is not properly standardized and that all HDR displays are so different that they need to give users a way to produce a good-looking image.

However, that is not the case! On average, HDR displays are more accurate to the source image than SDR ever was. These menus also often present SDR images in the background that do not represent how the game would actually react to each setting. Ultimately, all this does is cause extra confusion among gamers, scaring them off this new tech, while also making them more likely to mess up the settings and play the game in a way that doesn’t look like the developers intended.

We’ve seen all kinds of questionable behaviors in calibration menus, but the funniest is definitely one (unnamed) game that defaults to 900 nits as paper white! That is blinding and ~4.5 times brighter than the suggested default brightness.

For cases where the user has a display with what essentially is “fake” HDR, we should simply give up on them and use SDR instead. For marketing purposes, these displays take advantage of the loose certification requirements HDR has: many LCDs that don’t have local dimming present a very raised black floor (low contrast) with a low peak brightness (below 400 nits) in HDR mode. The solution for these isn’t to tweak HDR calibration settings until they look good, as often nothing can redeem them; SDR will likely offer a more balanced image.

You mentioned Dolby Vision and HDR10+ earlier in our chat. Do they make any sense in games? Could they be helpful at all for HDR gaming?

I would love for these technologies to play a bigger role in games; right now, though, they still feel more like marketing features than truly transformative tools.

That said, I don’t think the work behind them is wasted. Both Dolby and Samsung have clearly put a lot of effort into improving the situation, and there are real benefits there. However, despite these streamlining efforts, I believe they both ended up with something that is more complicated for devs to implement, with modest returns and limited compatibility.

Since the industry is only just getting comfortable with HDR10, it’s natural that it will take a few more years before we see broader adoption of more advanced formats. The upcoming HDR10+ Advanced and Dolby Vision 2 could move the needle further, so I’m genuinely curious to see where things go.

Recently, you also criticized developers for making color grading mistakes. How does that happen nowadays? Aren't there tools to help with such processes?

In short, it’s a pity that the artistic intent of the game is so often compromised in HDR. Behind every studio, there are many artists who work hard to craft an image with a specific mood to it. These artists, for the vast majority of the time, work in SDR and do grading and lighting in it. Games’ HDR implementations are still almost always an afterthought done by the tech/engine teams and aren’t artist-driven, so they drift away from the artistic intent that was tightly controlled in SDR.

In these cases, artists themselves won’t be happy with it, and that usually goes one of two ways:

• They block the game from shipping with HDR (it often happens with Unreal Engine games when they can’t get the look right).
• They swallow their pride in favour of marketing and accept the HDR looking different from what they envisioned.

Unreal Engine has massively lowered the technical skill floor for developing games. Entire UE AAA games are made with few engine coders and often none on graphics. So, these “color grading” mistakes come down to the devs either not knowing how to do it technically or simply not caring about it.

As mentioned before, finding information on this stuff is nightmarish (don’t even try AI!). Almost all of the art/graphics/images tools out there are stuck in SDR, and entire work pipelines revolve around them. Beyond the HDR Den, there are no public/standardized methods to upgrade SDR pipelines to HDR, so devs try to invent local ways of adapting them, but as mentioned above, color correction is an extremely delicate thing, and one slight change in a math formula can make or break the look of a game, so the results often leave something to be desired.

Is there anything developers could do in terms of graphics rendering that could show off HDR gaming more than it already does? With lighting, for instance?

Yes! Most game engines are doing fine regarding PBR and brightness dynamic range in the scene. However, with one exception (Gran Turismo?), all games are stuck in the Rec. 709/sRGB color space, only occasionally generating colors beyond it during post-processing. We need to move to wider color spaces like Rec. 2020 for albedo (color) textures and light colors as soon as possible. Only then will we have mind-blowing HDR in games. TVs are improving every year, and we are approaching 2500 nits with 90% Rec. 2020 coverage.

Thank you for your time. For the sake of HDR gaming, let's hope enough of your colleagues in game development finally take note.

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