Path of Exile 2
I had a look at HDR in Path of Exile 2 on Xbox (SX/SS) and Playstation (PS5/PS5 Pro).
PC gamers should use RenoDX.
It's implemented the same way on Xbox and Playstation consoles.
I have read that the PC version supports DX11, DX12 and Vulkan. DX11 has no HDR support. DX12 is 8 bit and Vulkan is true 10 bit HDR.
Both Xbox and Playstation consoles output HDR10 with RGB10A2_UNORM. So true HDR. That's a bit surprising, since Xbox uses DX12.
In-game we only have one slider. It's a brightness slider that increases upper shadows, midtones and highlights. That's of course not great, not to have separate adjustments for this. At least increasing the brightness slider does not affect the black level floor.
In picture 2 we see that there is no black level raise. In fact there is no black level raise, even if we push the brightness slider to +5 (but the upper shadows is raised too much).
Highlights increase when increasing the brightness slider. They can get pushed very high, so some clipping of detail can occur, depending on how capable your display is.
To give you an indication of what the game outputs at different settings on the brightness slider, I will show 4 pictures.
Picture 3 is with brightness slider at 0 and picture 4 is with +3 on the brightness slider. Below I show pictures with setting +1 and +2 on the slider.
The portal is a good indication of brighter bigger object we see in the game. It has the following max output;
- Brightness 0 - 500-600 nits
- Brightness +1 - 800-1000 nits
- Brightness +2 - 1000-1300 nits
- Brightness +3 - 1500-2000 nits
Setup:
I would simply setup the brightness slider to what looks the most natural to you.
When you increase the brightness slider, it will increase upper shadows. I don't think many will want to go higher than +3. Between 0 and +2 is probably what most will use in a dark room.
The peak brightness we can't setup separately, so we just have to accept if we get any clipping of detail in highlights.
At the end of the day, it's going to be a compromise between upper shadows and peak brightness, when we only have one in-game slider.
1 and 2 on brightness slider 1
1 and 2 on brightness slider 2
