Auto HDR support

[Thunderphantom]

I hope you can add Auto HDR to the game, I understand Windows 11 does it automatically as long as it has DirectX 11 or DirectX 12. but it seems it still does not detect DCS

[PLUTON]

Hello, I have windows 10 and when I select HDR in Windows the graphics in DCS display HDR.
So it detects DCS

[SharpeXB]

DCS doesn’t have HDR… 

but it should!

[Thunderphantom]

On 10/8/2021 at 5:47 PM, SharpeXB said:

DCS doesn’t have HDR… 

but it should!

windows auto HDR adds hdr by software. even if it is not native. for example in ace combat 7 add it to me

[SharpeXB]

20 minutes ago, Thunderphantom said:

windows auto HDR adds hdr by software. even if it is not native. for example in ace combat 7 add it to me

Pretty sure HDR would have to be supported by the game. Ace Combat probably supports HDR. I think what Widows 11 auto switching means is that you don’t have to manually enable it like you do in W10. Many HDR games have an auto-on setting within the game. Some require you to enable it in Windows before launching the game. 

[Tippis]

43 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Pretty sure HDR would have to be supported by the game.

It doesn't, at least not in the sense of having an “HDR capable game”. That's the whole point: it takes a standard dynamic range game and tries to figure out the actual full brightness (and darkness) of objects, and then feeds that value to an HDR-capable display. The game itself does not support HDR; the assets are not mastered for HDR; the draw subsystems figures it out on its own. It has nothing to do with switching HDR or automatically — it has to do with creating an HDR output signal where one wasn't present before.

 

There is still some compatibility, but again, not in the sense that the game must support HDR. Rather, it must have a rendering pipeline that allows for this kind of light sampling to work and to be injected on the fly. Not all games have that, and without going on too deep a search, it looks more like there's an internal database of which games can do this and which can't, as opposed to it being determined Magically™ by the system. So it's more a question of a game being “auto HDR-compatible” (which inherently and by very definition not the same thing as being “HDR capable”), by virtue of having the right kind of pipeline, and the developer can get some “free” bling by just altering that pipeline rather than creating an entirely new one with new assets to match.

 

Rather than being “pretty sure”, you could have trivially googled all of this.

 

[cfrag]

5 hours ago, Thunderphantom said:

windows auto HDR adds hdr by software. even if it is not native. for example in ace combat 7 add it to me

 

"HDR support" isn't the same as native "HDR content". Look at it this way (if you are old enough to remember that time  ) : at some time, TV broadcast companies added support for color and people started using color TVs. Yet, when the station broadcast something that was shot in b&w, it was displayed in b&w on the color display, even though it now came encoded as color TV. B&W has much less information (it encodes brightness, not color), and there was no way to add the missing color information to create a color image from a b&w source. Hence, b&w source displays as b&w even when broadcast as color signal and displayed on a color TV.

 

With HDR it is similar. Windows translates the normal SDR signal into a HDR format that the HDR-capable monitors can display. However, that translation process can't add new information - the dynamic brightness information simply isn't there; the resulting signal looks exactly as it would on non-HDR devices, but the signal now is compatible with HDR monitors. It's the analogue to 'playing b&w source on a color TV'.

 

(note: I've seen some clever attempts to create HDR from normal SDR source. It's similar to upscaling 720p to HD,  or HD source to 4K: it's faking it but can produce good-looking results)    

[Tippis]

50 minutes ago, cfrag said:

With HDR it is similar. Windows translates the normal SDR signal into a HDR format that the HDR-capable monitors can display. However, that translation process can't add new information - the dynamic brightness information simply isn't there; the resulting signal looks exactly as it would on non-HDR devices, but the signal now is compatible with HDR monitors. It's the analogue to 'playing b&w source on a color TV'.

 

(note: I've seen some clever attempts to create HDR from normal SDR source. It's similar to upscaling 720p to HD,  or HD source to 4K: it's faking it but can produce good-looking results)    

This is more akin to DLSS and similar methods of (re)creating non-existing information from a lower-quality sample as a part of the rendering process. As mentioned in the article above, it's not just making the signal compatible - it's actually creating those two extra bits of (mostly luminosity) data. Of course the results will be better if everything is mastered for HDR from the get-go, but it's a lot more than just showing B&W on a colour TV. It's more like showing (auto-)colourised images based on informed guesswork regarding what should have which colour.

 

It's still not creating HDR support in the strictest sense of the term, and it's definitely not native HDR content. The sales pitch from MS' side is more along the line of brightness upsampling (there's very little talk about an actual wider colour gamut).

[Thunderphantom]

2 hours ago, cfrag said:

 

"HDR support" isn't the same as native "HDR content". Look at it this way (if you are old enough to remember that time  ) : at some time, TV broadcast companies added support for color and people started using color TVs. Yet, when the station broadcast something that was shot in b&w, it was displayed in b&w on the color display, even though it now came encoded as color TV. B&W has much less information (it encodes brightness, not color), and there was no way to add the missing color information to create a color image from a b&w source. Hence, b&w source displays as b&w even when broadcast as color signal and displayed on a color TV.

 

With HDR it is similar. Windows translates the normal SDR signal into a HDR format that the HDR-capable monitors can display. However, that translation process can't add new information - the dynamic brightness information simply isn't there; the resulting signal looks exactly as it would on non-HDR devices, but the signal now is compatible with HDR monitors. It's the analogue to 'playing b&w source on a color TV'.

 

(note: I've seen some clever attempts to create HDR from normal SDR source. It's similar to upscaling 720p to HD,  or HD source to 4K: it's faking it but can produce good-looking results)    

Maybe because my English is not that good, I didn't make myself understood well.
currently the function of converting SDR to HDR has already been added. games like ace combat 7 and the witcher can now use it without having to modify the game by the creator.
what I was asking, was if you have to modify something or is it that windows does not detect it as a DCS game to transform it from SDR to HDR.
I also leave the paper of the function in windows 11
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/auto-hdr-preview-for-pc-available-today/

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, Thunderphantom said:

Maybe because my English is not that good, I didn't make myself understood well.
currently the function of converting SDR to HDR has already been added. games like ace combat 7 and the witcher can now use it without having to modify the game by the creator.
what I was asking, was if you have to modify something or is it that windows does not detect it as a DCS game to transform it from SDR to HDR.
I also leave the paper of the function in windows 11
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/auto-hdr-preview-for-pc-available-today/

Wow, seems like a great feature. HDR would certainly be a boost for DCS, especially in that all important aspect of being able to discern targets. It’s clear too that Auto HDR doesn’t quite produce as good an image as native HDR, so an even better improvement would be for DCS to get native HDR.

[Thunderphantom]

11 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Wow, seems like a great feature. HDR would certainly be a boost for DCS, especially in that all important aspect of being able to discern targets. It’s clear too that Auto HDR doesn’t quite produce as good an image as native HDR, so an even better improvement would be for DCS to get native HDR.

he says no, but it depends a lot on the game, ace combat 7 and rocket league look amazing. nier automata improves it but falls a bit short. but if DCS came up to nier standard, it would be a visually very different game

[SharpeXB]

DCS and one other combat flight sim are the only games I own which don’t have HDR. It needs an upgrade for sure. 

[ClydeBigBird]

Has anyone successfully used Windows 11's Auto HDR feature with DCS yet?  Could be a reason to upgrade for me.

[Boxin]

On 11/22/2021 at 9:24 AM, ClydeBigBird said:

Has anyone successfully used Windows 11's Auto HDR feature with DCS yet?  Could be a reason to upgrade for me.

It just saturates the colors and, imo, does not look as good as SDR.

[Catseye]

On 1/11/2022 at 2:48 PM, Boxin said:

It just saturates the colors and, imo, does not look as good as SDR.

Fuzzier when sharpness is required with instruments.

 

[SkateZilla]

Coming from someone that does 4K Video Editing and Rendering,...

You cannot inject HDR into an SDR Image, it has to be shot or rendered with HDR.

For Video, it's multiple phase video combined, for Rendering, it's multiple lighting passes combined.

Software injected HDR is not nearly as accurate as native HDR, nor close to being passable as such, and you will see extreme anomalies.

Edited July 19, 2022 by SkateZilla

[molleh]

On 7/18/2022 at 11:14 PM, SkateZilla said:

Coming from someone that does 4K Video Editing and Rendering,...

You cannot inject HDR into an SDR Image, it has to be shot or rendered with HDR.

For Video, it's multiple phase video combined, for Rendering, it's multiple lighting passes combined.

Software injected HDR is not nearly as accurate as native HDR, nor close to being passable as such, and you will see extreme anomalies.

 

As far as games and the Windows Auto HDR feature, that's not really true. It works quite well in every game that I've tried it with (assuming it activates - as the OP mentioned, it doesn't with DCS World for some reason.)

There is at least one way to get HDR working with DCS, and that is to use the ReShade "addon" version along with the ReShade 'Auto HDR' plugin (no relation to the Windows feature.) 

Edited December 16, 2022 by molleh

[imacken]

The Auto HDR function does not work in DCS.  If that is applied, then a notification on screen comes up from Windows to tell you.  No such notification comes up with DCS, and it is not on the Auto HDR supported games list.

I really wish we could see native HDR in DCS. In the popular civilian flight sim, HDR makes a massive difference in 4K!