Arc Raiders
RTX HDR setup guide Arc Raiders on PC.
This is a setup guide where I have tried to get as close as possible to SDR's midtone brightness (overall brightness) and saturation while getting the brightest highlights with the most detail.
I think RTX HDR looks pretty good in this game, compared to SDR. But it's not comparable to a native HDR implementation, that the game unfortunately do not support. And we can't use HDR mods, because of anti-cheat software.
Middle Greys slider
Setup this slider first. Adjust it to the overall brightness you want and then setup the other sliders afterwards.
I have set it up to get as close to SDR's overall brightness as possible meaning midtones and upper shadows.
I set the slider to 35 from default of 50.
We see in picture 3 and 4 that midtone brightness around 200 nits and upper shadows are pretty close between RTX HDR and SDR.
Picture 4 is SDR with HDR on in Windows. It has a black level raise. It's because the game has the Windows gamma bug that raises black levels. In picture 3, that uses RTX HDR, we see good black levels. The Windows gamma bug is not something that affects RTX HDR.
Peak brightness slider
RTX HDR can't output higher than 1000 nits. When you increase it above 1000 nits it just continues to raise the secondary highlights. I have increased it to 1150 nits, because when we decrease the middle greys slider so much, it also pulls down secondary highlights a bit.
Picture 1 and 3 is with RTX HDR and we see 1000 nits output and there is still room for separation in the highlights. Going higher than this and we begin to lose detail in highlights.
Picture 2 is SDR. If we compare the sky box to picture 1 then we see that RTX HDR actually gives us, what looks to be much more detail. RTX HDR is not rendering more detail that is not in the image in SDR. It is using the little information about separation in highlights in the SDR image to better separate those highlights. That is what we see. We see that improvement all over the image in brighter areas.
Saturation slider
This slider I had to lower to -50 to get color saturation with RTX HDR to look close to SDR.
Contrast slider
I didn't find any reason to adjust the default setting. This slider can be used to adjust shadows. We have to remember that SDR has a black level raise, due to the Windows gamma bug, so shadows and therefore also contrast has to look darker with RTX HDR than SDR.
