hello my friends and welcome back to my channel it's now for the third time that I'm revisiting HDR in Red Dead Redemption 2 and I have to say every time when I'm doing this it's getting better because I'm using better tools I have more experience on how to test HDR and I find better locations where I can actually analyze HDR and after a lot of analyzing after a lot of testing after a lot of playing around with the settings in the game my conclusion in regards of HDR and Red Dead Redemption 2 is actually straightforward it is pretty awesome and I know that my conclusion right now sounds different compared to my other two videos but keep in mind that I'm using proper tools I'm using different TVs now and I have really much more experience on how to test and analyze HDR and yes I know that also there are some YouTube channels or people out there they're still claiming that HDR in Red Dead Redemption 2 is broken or fake believe me that's not even close the case and because there are many people out there they're claiming that games like cyber Punk Red Dead Redemption 2 or alen wake 2 having a very bad HDR implementation let me make one thing very clear if your monitor screen TV can't display HDR in the correct way then don't blame the game in my opinion the bare minimum to enjoy HD actually an LG CX with a maximum Peak brightness of around 700 800 nits everything below this specs from an lgx I would not consider as a proper HDR monitor but now let's move on and let's talk about HDR and Red Dead Redemption and as always we need to start or we should start with the HDR settings what we have in the game so keep in mind this game does not support the HDR system level calibration on your console or DPC and when you open up the HDR calibration options in Red Dead Redemption 2 you can find three different settings HDR style which you can change between cinematic and game then you have the peak brightness setting and the paper white setting and the most important setting in the HDR calibration screen is the HDR style and you must change this from cinematic to game to have actually a proper HDR experience because if you wouldn't change this from cinematic to game you would have a very yeah powerless or lifeless picture because there's actually not really much going on in regards of the HDR maximum Peak brightness because the maximum Peak brightness then with cinematic enabled would be limited to the maximum brightness set on the paper white settings and believe me this is not a great experience when we talking about HDR so again change the HDR style from cinematic IC to game and then you can enjoy proper HDR Peak brightness in specular highlights and then we have the peak brightness setting which is responsible for the maximum Peak brightness in specular highlights this setting is the maximum brightness setting of your TV screen and monitor what I found is that in regards of the setting the PC version and the PlayStation 5 version or sorry the PlayStation 4 version is reacting differently but no worries at all I will explain later what is exactly the difference and last but not least we have the paper white setting which is responsible for the average picture brightness in this game so I will talk about all those settings again in my recommendations now I would say let's move on and let's talk about HDR Black Level floor and I know that many people keep saying that HDR is washed out in the red that Redemption 2 but according to my findings this is just not the case the game is more than capable of outputting zero nits and this is happening yeah very often in the game as well and if we now considering the fact that the game is more than capable of outputting zero nits that means that in situations like this here where the screen or the picture looks a little bit washed out we have to talk about craters intense so that's not an issue with HDR Black Level race or with the HDR Black Level floor that's just right now the greatest intent to make the picture look a little bit more foggy and my final conclusion in regards of the HDR Black Level Flor and Red Dead Redemption is that if we like to complain about the HD up Black Level floor then it is more likely because in some situations especially on the PC and doing cutscenes I found it has a little bit of yeah HDR Black Level crush on the PlayStation 5 I found you can see slightly more details but again this is complaining on a very high level the HDR Black Level floor in Red Dead Redemption is pretty much spoton and after we established that the HDR Black Level floor is spot on in this game we have to talk about the HDR specular highlights because we need to have two qualities in a game to have proper HDR first of all great HDR Black Level floor which is given in this game and then second of all we need to have very nice looking bright specular highlights and I'm very happy to announce that in regards of these specular highlights we have no issues in Red Dead Redemption 2 we have very bright specular highlights and on top we have very detailed specular highlights which is probably sometimes a little bit waste of time because if you consider that you just can see those veryify details when you look very closely it is actually yeah astounding how much work Rockstar Games put into this game just for HDR specular highlights okay so now we talked about the HDR Black Level floor which is spot on we talked about HDR specular highlights which are also absolutely stunning in this game what is actually missing color HDR color and here I have actually bad news and as many other games Red Dead Redemption 2 is hardly using any HDR color space there is just a very very minor use of the D C ip3 color space and even less use of the bt2020 color space and in my opinion it would be wrong to call the HDR implementation and red that Redemption 2 fake or broken just because of the fact that this game is not using the HDR color space more often so let's do a quick summary before me moving on to my recommended settings in regards of the HDR implementation I'm actually I'm actually very happy because after analyzing the game in a proper way I found that we have no problem at all with the HDR implementation there's our great HDR Black Level floor and we have specular looking yeah specular highlights actually so this is all what we want in a good HDR implementation of course we would like to see maybe a little bit more of the HDR color space but again this is not a must again HDR implementation and Red Dead Redemption 2 pretty awesome so now let's move on and let's talk about my recommended settings for Red Dead Redemption 2 and the most important setting what we have in the display option for the HDR settings is the HDR style you must and I like to repeat myself you must change this from cinematic to game to have a proper HDR experience the peak brightness setting is nothing else than the maximum Peak brightness capability of your screen monitor or TV and now and this is very important it depends if you play the game on the PC or the console version because there's a difference in terms of the setting of the maximum Peak brightness and what I found is that the PC version is actually spot on that means if you have a monitor with a maximum Peak brightness of around 1,000 nits and you set this setting to 1,000 nits the maximum Peak brightness output is around 1,000 nits but on the console that's a different story and what I found is that the console version is always slightly under tracking the maximum Peak brightness in this game and that means that let's say you set the maximum Peak brightness in the game to 1,000 nits the maximum Peak brightness in specular highlights would be just around 800 900 nits that's why my recommendation is if you play the console version always make sure that the maximum Peak brightness is set 200 nits above the maximum Peak brightness capability of your screen so again let's say you have a monitor with a maximum Peak brightness capability of 1,000 nits then the in-game setting in Red Dead Redemption should be 1,200 nits for the console version and last but not least we have the paper white setting and this setting is also depending on the HDR tone mapping format what you're using on your TV and if you like to play this game with H or Dolby Vision enabled then I would recommend a value around 200 to let's say maximum 300 nits because at some point you will start seeing some yeah clipping and specular highlights if you set this value to high and if you like to use Dynamic toone mapping on on the LG o TVs or a similar tone mapping option on similar TVs then give it a try and change the paper white setting to around 150 I would not recommend to go below 100 because at some point you will lose maximum Peak brightness in specular highlights and of course we have to talk about the find dark area settings for the LG o TVs but to be very honest after testing after analyzing this game I'm not quite sure if I actually should recommend something because there is no issue at all with the HDR Black Level floor in this game but there is some additional HDR Black Level Ray as soon you use vrr or HDR but this additional HDR Black Level race is not coming from the game and it is really just visible in my opinion when you play the game in a very very dark room so please keep this in mind if you like to use the ftda settings and if you like to play this game with H or Dolby Vision enabled then use a fine tune dark area setting of minus 4 and if you like to play this game with Dynamic to mapping on then you should use the fine tune dark area setting with a setting of around minus8 maximum minus10 and if you like to know my personal recommendation then I would say go ahead and play this game with HGH enabled so please keep in mind there is no native Dolby Vision support but of course you can use Dolby Vision if this suits you better I found Dynamic toe mapping on is just over brighten the picture especially during the night way too much so what is my summary Now what is my conclusion in regards of the HDR implementation in Red Dead Redemption and after testing this game with proper tools thank you very much lilium and after testing this game with way more experence erience than before when I did the last video about this game I have to say from a technical point of view HDR in Red Dead Redemption 2 is pretty awesome the problem with the HDR implementation Red Dead Redemption is that there is not much to show in HDR because we are not talking about a cyber Punk game we don't have neon lights or LED lights all over the place most of the time we talking about candles and yeah for this when we consider in this fact HDR looks pretty well in Red Dead Redemption
