RTX Video HDR Modded For Games... And The Results Are Excellent

[Music] [Applause] at the end of January Nvidia released a driver enabling RTX video HDR a driver side tool to enable automatic conversion of SDR videos into HDR ones with the help of realtime machine learning on an RTX GPU if you enable it and watch videos on YouTube in your browser that are SDR they will now be presented as HDR ones but that is not the only thing that driver had hidden in this driver was something stupendously cool and it was discovered by moders shortly after release alongside this machine learning HDR conversion for videos Nvidia has created the same tool for games it's not yet yet enabled in the driver with any user interface and who knows when it might if at all be enabled in the future but it is there just hidden away in the driver right now although it is hidden at the moment you can still use this HDR conversion tool for games on an RTX GPU right now so you can add highquality HDR to essentially the entire catalog of games created to run on Microsoft's operating systems or even games that were never made to run on Windows that is what this video is about today nvidia's hidden AI based HDR converter tool for games RTX HDR as I'm going to call it how it looks how it runs and much more so how do you get it working first download the Envy true HDR mod from Nexus mods from here all you need to do is open up the provided exe there in the compressed package when clicking that executable it'll open up a command terminal from here you can Elite hack or manual type the executable you want to Target or more simply just drag and drop the EXC into the command prompt window and hit enter here we'll ask you what quality level of HDR you want and then you just have to type in the one you want and hit enter that is it it's usually that simple for most game out there and for those that it's not I'll talk about that later but before I get into that you may be wondering why even use this driver hack in the first place when Windows 11 ships per default with auto HDR which is a similar feature from Microsoft to enable HDR in games that do not support it the reasons to use this RTX HDR over Auto HDR are many actually this RTX HDR works with DX titles from dx9 up to dx12 Auto HDR per default only works with dx11 and 12 titles and it has a white listing of games to work from so it covers less of the entire PC catalog by default I knew this while making this video so I wanted to load up a lot of earlier directex titles as I was curious to see how they would work for directex 10 I chose Lost Planet extreme condition this is the original PC release from 2007 after having dazzled console Gamers on Xbox 360 at the end of 2006 Capcom released this version that I'm showing here on screen 6 months later in 2007 and that was a souped up version with a lot of new direct X10 graphical features dx10 was still a nent API at this point and honestly in 2007 there were not that many better looking games than this one on the market just loading it up now I was astonished how polished it all looks from the Stellar animation and per object motion blur to those cool direct X10 effects like the added extruded fur using a geometry Shader that's something completely missing from the console versions or dx9 so it is and always was a handsome game how does it look seeing it with this RTX HDR for the first time I think my overall take is this looks terrific iic Lost Planet was a game that was already always leveraging HDR for its internal rendering it was just outputting in SDR and it was very clearly built with HDR principles in mind when you are indoor in caves for example there's always this strong contrast of the darkness and the strong Bloom from the light filtering in through the Cave's opening with this RTX HDR that contrast is even more Stark and even more Fantastical looking when you're outside on the Frozen Plains of edn3 the art TX HDR takes on an entirely different shape where becomes almost about snow blindness as any bit of the scenery that is directly lit in sunlight tends to White out with a bloom that the game has and it makes the whitest parts of the snow on the screen intensely bright I think this is appropriate given the game's atmosphere of survival against the elements when outdoors and it is sure additive to the experience another literal highlight of the HDR is the glowing alien thermal energy and how that looks with hdr on there's these little pockets of intense orange that you can see amidst Seas of white or blue explosions are another highlight in HDR but honestly they've always looked really awesome in Lost Planet Windows 11 Auto HDR did not even toggle for this game when I was loading it up which is usually what it does in the right hand corner in those games that it will support which you can see here so this entirely new and genuinely revitalizing HDR experience was only made possible thanks to to this driver based tool and modrad Ando our trailer for direct X9 games I was having a hard time even deciding what I should test as there are so many good direct X9 games I ended up testing some very different genres to get a feel for how RTX HDR will impact them one of the most spectacular ones I tried out was blur from bizarre Creations rest in peace this game did not get the proper Fanfare it probably deserved on release in 2010 it's a snazzy and well-presented racing game that has many elements from cart games Alla Mario Kart instead of racing around little go-karts you drive classic or modern cars from well-known manufacturers the game was not as successful as Activision would have liked and bizarre creation was shuttered less than a year after this game's release unfortunately even though I'm showing the game off right now cannot easily be purchased today as it seems to have been delisted from Steam I think the game is actually great fun and on PC it was a very late period director X9 title and in spite of that direct X9 in 2010 it looks fantastic and the Nvidia HDR here takes it up a notch I think some of the greatest differences I noticed was in the skyline rendering which blooms out with great highlights in HDR and contrasts greatly with the racing terrain below which tends to be more neutral in color tone and brightness owing to the surfaces being made of dirt or asphalt so as you are rounding corners on a variety of the games track you can often find find yourself being slightly dazzled by the strong Hues found on the horizon that's something that I wouldn't say happened with the game before another nice benefit of the HDR is found on the cars themselves which often have convincing glint and Reflections across their surfaces which HDR picks up nicely and of course there's also the various special effects that are thrown out when you use the onrack powerups in the game some of which look really spectacular like the track lightning that looks particularly awesome with this RTX hdr on given how I'm testing HDR and dx9 I really couldn't help myself so I had to load up halflife 2's Lost Coast now in 2005 this was a mini free expansion that released and it was a demo of HDR rendering and one of the first ones out there for a commercial game engine this isn't an HDR demo of HDR output as I'm showcasing in this video today but it was a internal HDR rendering demo so it utilized Bloom and eye adaptation effects to communicate the effect of hdr on an SDR screen in 2024 with nvidia's RTX HDR this demo is even more impactful as all those same effects stand out more than they did almost 20 years ago now on an SDR screen I especially noticed it inside the church and in the town where I found the effect from the sky blooming out being particularly arresting here I would argue that the HDR effect from the RTX HDR is somewhat exaggerated in this demo but that comes from the content of the demo itself it was designed to kind of show an exaggerated eye adaptation effect and I think that bears out in the content that you're seeing on screen right now there's not much subtlety to the HDR rendering here actually it's all about being in your face with the highlights that just start showing up and Bloom out really quickly this is quite quite a different story from two other games that I tried out that were direct X9 as well dawn of War Soul Storm from 2009 and Jet Set Radio now for Jet Set I would say HDR here just generally made the game look more like a native modern game it was brighter thanks to HDR the thing is its cartoonish styling and very simple almost two-tone gray lighting does not have any specular highlights to take advantage of so the game just doesn't have those things that HDR really pumps up with RTX HDR in a game like this you're just getting a version of the game that is more appropriate on a modern HDR display if anything I would say Jet Set showcases some of the slight limitations of HDR conversion techniques which tend to map the whitest whites to full brightness and RTX HDR does that too so things like lines on the road are going to be particularly bright in this game even though there's no good real lighting reason for that to be the case it looks fine in the end but I would say this is definitely not a standout title for using this RTX HDR I would say there was a similar effect in dawn of War but I think that's more about the game's art style choices see in the Grim darkness of the 41st Millennium things are depressing and Bleak and there's only Brown and gray the game's environments and a lot of the lighting in this game is very midtone the only thing that really stands out on an HDR display here while using RTX HDR was things like muzzle flashes from the guns being fired by the troops on the ground there are little bright spots in an otherwise very kind of dark drab game a little nice additive HDR effect that was minimal but it's nothing all too transformative still a nice little positive here so while not every title is going to blow your socks off if you enable this RTX HDR it does have an incredible backlog of Legacy support here and this is above and beyond what Microsoft's Auto HDR has and it can breathe new life into older titles depending upon how they were made like Lost Planet for example or blur that Legacy support of supporting directx9 and directx10 very easily is not the only advantage that this RTX HDR has over Auto HDR another Advantage is in the nature of its conversion and I can show that off well in control here you're seeing control with auto hdr on which just essentially inherence all the stuff that the SDR presentation has control has some issues I would say in its SDR and auto HDR presentation for one the blacks are raised so a lot of areas that are dark end up looking kind of gray another issue is that the game showcases a lot of banding and as we can see here Auto HDR is inheriting that and more looking in the dark corner here we can see various shades of colors that are comprising it and the colors are not blending into each other with a gradual fallof instead we can see discrete changeover points between the color values this is banding and in the darkest region we can also see that it's actually kind of gray I don't think it looks good in SDR or in Auto HDR honestly now let's compared to the RTX HDR here this does some things differently one there appears to be banding reduction there's more gradual falloff here between the areas that are dark I wouldn't say it's 100% perfect but it's better than what Auto HDR is doing another thing is that if we look at the darkest area we can see that it's getting closer to a trer darker black which is something that auto HDR does not do here so I would say based on an experience like this one in control this RTX HDR is going to offer a better HDR experience than Auto HDR the only slight caveat that I can notice based upon my comparisons is that the RTX HDR here does slightly increase color saturation and I think that can be seen in the opening pre-rendered video segment when we look at ATI the janitor his jacket here with RTX HDR is a more saturated blue than it is in the auto HDR presentation the auto HDR presentation in that aspect is more true to the original game which is definitely going for a desaturated art style so by default it appears that RTX HDR here in this pre-release driver has a slight vividness boost or saturation boost like the Nintendo switch has right now modders have created ways to get around this effect but should RTX HDR come out in an official form I would like there to be a saturation toggle so that the user has a choice whether or not to increase vividness another difference to consider with auto HDR is the performance hit of RTX HDR since this is using the machine learning Hardware in an RTX GPU to do extra work to achieve the end result it will have a performance penalty when turned on I measured the effect of that in deusex mankind divided in The Benchmark there on an RTX 370 at 4K and I found that Microsoft's Auto HDR only decreases performance by less than a single percentage Point RTX hdr on low by little more than 4% medium and very high decrease performance by a little bit more than 6% respectively so there is is a cost in running this in any form whether it's on the low setting or the very high setting but honestly that's not too much of a performance decrease to not get raised black levels like we can see in Auto HDR and it will also decrease banding something that auto HDR will not do I would say that is a performance hit for HDR that is worth it at any level and if you're going to make a choice here there's not really big differences between the low and the very high setting and if they are there they are so subtle in their differences that I haven't really noticed them yet so in all I would say RTX HDR in this weird preview modded version in the driver is really cool and I've had a blast testing it as a part of that testing I wanted to see how far I could take it Beyond directx9 so I tried it out in API that it does not natively support what about openg like we can see here in Doom 3's original release from 2004 well getting RTX HDR to work here was very simple all I had to do was toggle this parameter in the driver to prefer third layered on dxgi swapchain and then the RTX HDR works as if the game was a native DirectX app in a dark game like this one HDR adds stupendously to the presentation as the entire game is about to play between Darkness and Light and how light plays off reflective plastic and metal materials Doom 3 was completely ahead of the curve when it came out in 2004 in this aspect and I think reexperiencing it with RTX hdr on on an OLED panel in 2024 was just Sublime the dark areas stayed incredibly dark with RTX hdr on and all the highlights were pristine and bright I highly recommend trying out Doom 3 with this mod if you can I also tried it out in a Vulcan title but not in the typical rather I used an emulator rpcs3 to try out Killzone 2 and that works in the same way as Doom 3 did you have to turn on that little flag in the driver that I talked about and Bam you're playing Killzone 2 under RP pcs3 with RTX hdr on in 2024 it's pretty cool the fact though that these opengl titles and Vulcan titles worked so easily with RTX HDR got me thinking and I wanted to try out other titles on even older apis what about DirectX 8 as we're seeing here with Star Wars Republic Commando from 2005 native DirectX 8 will definitely not work by its Lonesome but you can use a program called DG Voodoo which will convert directex 8 calls into DirectX 11 calls and thus it will make RTX HDR work as if native as we're seeing in all this footage here and as you can see I think it works pretty well in this game in a game like this one that extensively uses Bloom and a combination of real-time shadows and baked lighting the principles of lighting are already there to a degree so adding in HDR is a natural fit in comparison to Jet Set Radio that I talked about earlier basically the more modern the lighting techniques are in a game the better HDR is fit for it and I would say it looks a especially great in many scenes in Republic Commando as all that Blaster fire and special effects work tends to be white or blue coated with high levels of luminance than in HDR and it gives off a great contrast to the otherwise gray and brown of much of the game's environments at least in the first few [Music] levels there are several factories buried deep underground but they're impenetrable to our large assault forces but it doesn't stop there at direct X8 we go further what about directex 6 Legacy of cane Soul Reaver from 1999 yep that works just fine once again using DG voodo in a title like this one there are not many trappings of modern lighting there's a few but not too much so RTX HDR and a title like this one is mainly about its brightness boosting on a Modern Display while keeping as much local contrast as is possible for those graphics on screen I mainly noticed it in a game like this one that doesn't have modern lighting with the special effects once again fire Soul flares and things like that even though it isn't such a big upgrade for an old game like this one I'm still kind of just incredibly impressed that this is working at all in the first place but once again I think we can go further and deeper what about 3D effects Glide turoc dinosaur hunter from 1997 says yes it is possible by utilizing a separate program called end Glide 3D effects is emulated to a great degree under dx11 and once again we can get RTX HDR here to work too thanks to that oh Brave New World we can play turac with machine learned HDR what a wondrous sight in a game like this though RTX HDR is once again more about the brightness boosting while maintaining contrast turak does not even have lighting at all for HDR to take advantage of yep turac is too cool for lighting but seriously I have to say at the end of this video that I'm mightily impressed from this RTX HDR in my first contact with it it doesn't have a UI to work with and it's only a mod right now but I still found it an incredibly smooth experience and easy to use actually it just kind of worked in a lot of titles I just tried it looked natural and enhanced the experiences and it importantly superseded the quality of Microsoft's Auto HDR at a small performance cost but one that I would say is worth it in the end if and when Nvidia releases this publicly into the driver with UI to tweak it and potentially turn off any saturation changes it might ad then I would say this is game-changing stuff for playing Legacy games on PC or even newer games that do not manage to ship with HDR if anything it is another great advantage of those NVIDIA drivers that have extensive features for Legacy games things like dld DSR or SG ssaa it's really just phenomenal stuff anyway I hope you enjoyed this video of me covering this hidden RTX HDR mod if you did enjoy it hit that like button and 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Channel: Digital Foundry

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Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2024