Alan Wake 2 - HDR Settings & Analysis - PS5 - Xbox - PC - LG OLED - Good HDR But Not Perfect

hello my friends and welcome back to my channel I have good news and bad news for you and I would like to start with the very good news first because the HDR Black Level floor in alen Wake 2 is spot on but what does it mean it means that we already ticked one out of two checkboxes for having a great HDR implementation and don't get me wrong to have a really good HDR implementation in a game or movie we of course need more than just two checkboxes but in my opinion we have two qualities two major qualities what we need to have to actually yeah start talking about a good HDR implementation and the headline for this is contrast and contrast includes Shadow details very good Shadow details and of course specular highlights very bright specular highlights and we established already that in regards of the HDR Black Level floor there is nothing to complain about in Len wake 2 if there would be something to complain then it would be around HDR Black Level Crush because in certain locations or scenarios I found that Yi missing some very fine details so we have probably some minor HDR Black Level Crush but to be very honest I rather have some minor HDR Black Level Crush than an HDR Black Level floor like in Starfield the second important quality for a good HDR implementation is specular highlights or brightness maximum Peak brightness and here we running into an issue because I'm not quite happy about the maximum Peak brightness in specular highlights in Len wake 2 and before we now talking about HDR in more detail let's talk about the main difference what I found in regards of HDR between the PC version and the console version with rate racing disabled on the PC the game looks very similar in regards of Shadow details or how Shadows or darker areas are getting dis played on the screen they're looking very similar to the console version but as soon you enable rate raising it changes everything so first of all what we need to understand is that Len W 2 supports the HDR system level calibration on the PlayStation 5 Xbox series and pc windows 11 that means you must and this is a crucial thing you must set up the HDR system level calibration in a correct way otherwise you have yeah not very good experience when it comes to HDR because the game relies on this information but even I have set up the HDR system level calibration in the correct way and you can verify this in the game because the game reads back the value but even then I found that some specular highlights are not very specular and it appears to me that we have some sort of creaters intent in regards of the specular highlights in Len W 2 because some of the specular highlights are very power full and very very bright but others are just a little bit dull and yeah Power less I would almost say so it appears to me that yeah this is the case and I have to admit that I found situations where I or where I analyzed uh very low maximum Peak brightness but the overall impression from the picture was actually not too bad so what I like to say is that we don't need all the time maximum Peak brightness specular highlights sometimes less is even more let's have a quick look on the internal HDR settings what we have in the game and we have actually two settings one is called game brightness setting and the other one is the user interface brightness and as always the user interface brightness is really just for the user interface for the hut or some symbols on the screen and you can change this as you like it but now when we talking about the game brightness setting it is getting a a little bit more interesting because the game brightness setting is not just changing the your average picture brightness or is helping us to lift the Black Level floor slightly to have a little bit more Shadow details no it's also changing or affecting the maximum Peak brightness in specular highlights and this is actually very helpful because I mentioned already that I'm not very happy about yeah the specular highlights about the maximum Peak brightness and specular highlights and by increasing the game brightness setting we can help the game to yeah pop a little bit more but as always we need to be careful that we're not increasing this value too much because we lifting the whole GMA in the game which is in my opinion not a big problem because we still yeah even with setting the game brightness to 100 we still have a perfect HDR Black Level floor this is very very important but the game in general gets just much much brighter and when you have let's say a location scenario where you have a lot of or mist or it is actually or it looks already a little bit washed out by greaters intense then when you increase the brightness you lift everything up and it looks even more washed out so this is to consider but what I found is increasing the level or the setting to 75 is actually a good start especially when you use H I actually can go even a little bit bit higher but as always this is a personal reference and I found 75 to 100 is actually a good start another quality of a good HDR implementation would be the use of HDR colors DCI P3 or bt2020 and here we have some sort very minor use of the HDR color space and we need to understand one thing it is not necessary or mandatory to use all the time the HDR color space because many colors or most of the colors are yeah working just perfectly with the SDR color range which you can see most of the time in HDR games or even in HDR movies but of course we like to use the HDR color space because we spend a lot of money for our HDR TVs earlier in the video I mentioned already that I recommend to use HC because with adjusted game brightness settings it is actually doing a great job but as always it is up to you if you like to use Dynamic to mapping on rather than HD that's yeah your choice but I would not recommended the reason is quite simple we have specular highlights in this game which are not reaching the maximum Peak brightness capabilities of our TV with using the HGH settings on our TV and in combination with adjusting the game brightness setting to let's say 75 we increasing the maximum Peak brightness and specular High highlights and not just like that we getting actually more HDR brightness in general with just enabling Dynamic to mapping on on the TV and not increasing the game brightness in the game this is not the case that means we have actually a lower quality of hdr on the Xbox series s an X you can play this game in Dolby Vision but let me tell you one thing there is no native Doby Vision support that means they game will look very similar to hghh my recommendation is still even on the Xbox use HGH so we talked a lot about the HD up level floor which is implemented in the game but what about the HDR level race when we activating HDR and when we activating vrr which I strongly recommend because the PlayStation 5 and also the Xbox series version are not running with perfect 60 FPS s the whole time so enabling VR on the console will help to actually get you a much better experience but the problem is as in many many other games as soon you enable vrr you have additional Black Level rays and to mitigate this HDR Black Level race or vrr black level rise there's nothing what we can do inside the game because if we would like to change some settings in the game we would actually crush your Shadow details what we need to do is we need to use the fine-tune dark area settings on our LG OLED TV or the shadow detail setting on our Samsung TV and if you like to use HGH in this game then my recommendation is for the fion dark era setting minus 4 and if you like to use Dynamic toe mapping on which again I would strongly not to recommend to use then go with minus8 because this makes sure that we don't have any additional HDR Black Level rays and on my s95 C I found that setting the shadow details to minus 2 maximum minus three will help to mitigate the vrr Black Level race but we need to be very careful with this setting because it is not as good as the LG OLED fine tune dark area setting the shadow detail setting on the Samsung S 95c or similar TVs is changing a lot more than just the very low end from the gamma core as the ftda settings are doing that's why be very careful when you change this rather have it set to zero than losing fine details in Shadows okay my friends so what is my summary now in regards of HDR in elen Wake 2 and I like it it's not one of the best HDR implementations when we talking about specular highlights but in regards of the HDR Black Level floor they did a great job that's exactly how we like it or how it should be in every HDR game because what we learned is that the HDR Black Level floor is one of the yeah most important yeah qualities in a good HDR implementation because I just like to remember you on Starfield it is it is still not fixed by the way officially not fixed we still have this very washed out look which destroys the whole picture here elen wake 2 is actually a very good reference when we talking about your HDR Black Level floor implementation and the only thing I can complain about in this game in regards to HDR is the yeah maximum Peak brightness in specular highlights but this is already complaining on a higher level especially with HG the game just looks a little bit too dark and yeah we need to increase the brightness setting unfortunately a lot to get a a nice looking picture out with h enabled so we have seen games like Spider-Man 2 where the HDR implementation in combination with HG enabled is just spot on really really great and yeah my reference alongside games like and Clank but in this case something is just a little bit missing it's not a big deal breaker because we have settings where we can change it but it would be of course better if this wouldn't be necessary or not in the case as we like or as we have to do it but in general the HDR implementation in Len W 2 is is on a high level on a great level it's not a masterpiece like Spider-Man retel and Clank or maybe Forza on the Xbox but it is very very good and it makes actually really fun to look at the picture because the graphic especially the PC version is really outstanding in my opinion especially with rate raising enabled and past raising and by the way I'm working on a performance video and yeah I hope I can finish this at some point but there is quite of a spoiler alert there is quite of a difference between the console version and a high-end PC which of course should be expected like that anyway in regards of HDR I very happy and I need to continue playing this game because the Story gameplay in this game is also very good

Channel: GamingTech

Views: 22,814

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Id: LpkKiHgCArc

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023