Screenshot 2 – debug bands - overall colors are incorrect here as the range had to be adapted to show this screenshot in SDR this is why the debug bands look dark grey instead of SDR white If you don’t see any bands chances are high that the display has erroneously stayed in SDR mode. So if you have HDR content on screen and you can see the bands you can be sure your display has truly switched to HDR mode. If the display for some reason doesn’t properly switch to HDR mode, these bands would not be visible as everything above 1.0 would get clamped to SDR white. This mode (see Screenshot 2) clamps all color components to 1.0 in every second horizontal band. To verify HDR mode is really on, a special debug mode was added to the game’s tone mapping shader.
![nexusmods best rise of the tomb raider mods nexusmods best rise of the tomb raider mods](https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2178/images/thumbnails/52/52-1634390936-351605819.jpeg)
The experience at Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes is that it isn’t always easy to find out if your display has truly switched to HDR mode or not.
#NEXUSMODS BEST RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER MODS DRIVER#
In fact NVIDIA’s driver allows for displaying linear space, floating point frame buffers and thus tone mapping functions need to evolve to cater for this. HDR capable displays now put higher demands on tone mapping functions, as the desired output is no longer just SDR. Tone mapping has been applied to get down to standard dynamic range (SDR) displays for many years. Many games are already rendering to a higher dynamic range internally. Let’s concentrate on HDR for this blog post. The two dimensions of improvement in these new displays are often thought of as wider gamut and higher dynamic range (HDR). While UHD as a specification was originally developed for televisions, the technologies involved will start to impact many classes of displays soon. With the advent of Ultra High Definition (UHD) television, displays are taking a substantial step forward compared to the standards developers have been used to for the past two decades. This blog explores how we added support for true HDR to a real-time 3D application, focusing on the challenges tied to game development. Authors: Jeroen Soethoudt (Nixxes), Jurjen Katsman (Nixxes) and Holger Gruen(NVIDIA)