Horizon Forbidden West HDR Settings - 4 Things Guerrilla Games Didn't Tell YOU

so i have installed the latest patch of 1.05 for horizon forbidden west and measured the hdr output using a canon reference monitor with real-time waveform analysis the first thing you need to know is that horizon forbidden west doesn't support the hdig calibration settings on the sony ps5 console so the game's hdr output would be affected by the console's adjust hdr screens to improve the hdr picture quality you have to adjust at least one of three hdr sliders provided inside the game namely brightness shadows and highlights the second thing you need to know is that the peak brightness measured on this calibration screen inside the game doesn't correspond to the peak brightness during actual gameplay for example the default brightness and highlights values of 0 in performance mode was meant to top out at 1200 nits according to this calibration screen but once we exceeded the menu and got back into the game the sun and the surrounding clouds in the sky would still surpass 1200 nits going up to 4 000 nits and even beyond the third thing you need to know is that the hdr output of resolution mode is slightly brighter than performance mode with resolution mode selected the peak brightness inside the calibration screen would measure 1400 nits whereas once we switched to performance mode the peak luminance would drop slightly to 1200 nits this discrepancy carried over to real world gameplay too if we got out from the calibration screen in resolution mode and looked at the sun peeking out from the clouds in the sky and also its reflections on the flowing stream we saw bright specular highlights going beyond 4000 nits occasionally even approaching 10 000 nits i'll turn on false color on my canon monitor which is essentially a luminance heat map to make it easier for you to see ok let's switch to performance mode in horizon forbidden west i'll turn off false color and also reset the frame luminance monitor so we can record a clean set of results if we swing the camera towards the sun in the sky and also the reflections on the water you can see that the measured peak brightness topped out at 6000 days in performance mode rather than the super bright peaks in resolution mode that almost hit 10 000 nits this brightness difference also explains why the picture dimming during camera movement was more obvious in resolution mode than in performance mode as i've pointed out in my previous video about horizon forbidden west now 6000 nits in performance mode is still too bright for most consumer televisions to handle so we need to use the in-game hdr sliders to bring it down as you can hopefully see from the waveform monitor at the bottom right of the screen the brightness setting would affect the entire luminance range bumping it to the maximum value of 10 would peak at 4000 nits on this calibration screen and also increase the average picture level or apl on the other hand dropping brightness to its minimum value of -10 would kept peak luminance at around 350 nits again on this calibration screen and compress the dynamic range let's reset the values okay adjusting the shadow's settings would affect the region mostly below 50 knits either brightening or darkening near black elements the highlights setting would affect the uppermost 40 of eotf from peak luminance so it would interact with the brightness setting since the measured peak luminance in this calibration screen does not translate to peak brightness in actual gameplay i spent a lot of time experimenting with different settings inside the calibration screen and then going back out into the game to measure the results i first tried using the brightness control to lower the peak brightness but found that even the minimum value of -10 would still let specular highlights stray beyond 1500 and even 2000 nits in actual gameplay while causing average picture level or apl to become too dark the next approach i tried was to set brightness to -4 inside the calibration screen which would then translate to peak measurements of slightly above 4 thousands in actual gameplay you can't use hdig with this approach because hdig would hard clip above 800 nits resulting in a very harsh transition from bright regions to suddenly white out instead you have to set hdr tone mapping to off which would provide a gradual roll off towards 4000 nits which is the default on lg oleds if there's no maximum display luminance or max cll metadata and consoles generally don't output such metadata for hdr games as a result more specular highlight detail would be preserved with hdr tone mapping or dynamic tool mapping set to off but please bear in mind that because the 4008 roll-off on lg oled televisions generally starts around 250 nits the brightest elements would be toned down and not look as impactful the best approach in my opinion would be to continue engaging hdig but use the highlights setting inside the game to lower the peak brightness we found that a value of -9 was under 700 when looking at the sun and so went for -8 the overall apl was still a bit too bright though when we turned on false color on the canon monitor there were too many elements that exceeded 200 nits decreasing brightness to -2 brought the apl down to a more reasonable level all this faffing about just made me wish that horizon forbidden west was available on the xbox series x where the console's adobe vision support could theoretically wrap the game inside a container tailored for compatible dolby vision tvs without needing any users to make manual adjustments but before you accuse me of being an xbox fanboy i've also criticized the subpar adobe vision implementation in some games on the xbox series x as you can see for yourself in this video here

Channel: HDTVTest

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Id: LPMW4RqTR8g

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022