Raised HDR Black Floor Level [FIXED, NOT A BUG]

[Starsky83]

Hi,

I just wanted to raise a 'bug' in regard to the black floor level within the 1.57 open beta HDR implementation. Game version 1.57.0.46s

The black floor level is rather highly raised, leading to blacks looking grey and the picture generally looking a little washed out, in particular at night.

When calibrating the black floor level on my Samsung S90C QD-OLED panel, the truck disappears at about 60%, this should be and normally is at around 0%. I have manually force adjusted the black floor level using 3rd party software to check if this was in fact correct, and it demonstrated that the black floor level is significantly raised and lowering it solved the washed out grey look.

My system is a Windows 11 PC running a Ryzen 7 9700x, 9070XT and 32gb of DDR5 ram. Connected to a 77inch Samsung S90C gen 2 panel

Note this is the same in ETS2 as well.

I have no mods and plugins active, refreshed the config file as well, although for some reason the mods still show in the log, but I can assure you these are not active.

I created a new profile and check and it is the same. Attached new game log

Thanks,

[Starsky83]

As I saw the latest patch included HDR adjustments, I thought I better recheck and update this report.

Unfortunately the black floor level is unchanged and reading at 0.1000853. This should be 0.0000000 as per the ingame slider I have set.

A change I do see is my black level calibration point has increased to 72%. Nit sure if that was intended.

On a side note, the black level that is in the config file is what I have set and is VERY close to that 0.0. However, it does NOT match the in game hdr levels. So there is a disconnect there.

Thanks

[morrelo]

Hello, there is some misunderstanding how the calibration works. The slider is from 0 % to 100 % (not from 0 to 100). 0 % doesn't mean 0.000 nits and it should not be 0.000 nits, just like 100 % doesn't mean 100 (or whatever) nits.

And regarding "The black floor level is rather highly raised, leading to blacks looking grey and the picture generally looking a little washed out, in particular at night." - it sounds like you are thinking that you are setting the black level of tonemapping, but here you are actually setting the black level of calibration. So the fact that you don't like "washed out look" is a suggestion, not a bug, we don't have a setting for that, it's tuned by us and it cannot be adjusted.

[Clysop]

Hello, there is some misunderstanding how the calibration works. The slider is from 0 % to 100 % (not from 0 to 100). 0 % doesn't mean 0.000 nits and it should not be 0.000 nits, just like 100 % doesn't mean 100 (or whatever) nits.

And regarding "The black floor level is rather highly raised, leading to blacks looking grey and the picture generally looking a little washed out, in particular at night." - it sounds like you are thinking that you are setting the black level of tonemapping, but here you are actually setting the black level of calibration. So the fact that you don't like "washed out look" is a suggestion, not a bug, we don't have a setting for that, it's tuned by us and it cannot be adjusted.

When the game is opened with HDR off, the background in the start menu is pure black. When started with HDR on, the background is #040404, no matter what the settings are set to. Are you saying this is intentional? It really looks like there's something wrong with the HDR output that causes raised black levels.

[Starsky83]

Yeah, I pulled up an HDR analysis tool and it just cannot display black at all, nit even close. I guess having an OLED makes this look even worse. Its not just the blacks, all the colours are also impacted and visually lools more accurate with HDR turned off. Luckily, this issue is so wide spread that there is a tool within reshade to fix this. However, on console, this wont be an option. Which as usual in game reviews, the recommendation would be to turn off HDR.

Many games unfortunately have this issue and Im not really sure why. RDR2 launched with awful HDR, but they stated it was artistic intention or something like that and did provide an option for correct HDR presentation. Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077 and many more all have the same issue. The black floor level effects everything about the presentation unfortunately

I also note but have yet to mention is that in the announcement for HDR they mention something about the colours. Im not sure of the exact wording, however, this implementation they are using BT 709 which is SDR colour space, not the wider BT 2020. So I was surprised by this as I assumed they wrre going to use the wider coloir gamit of HDR.

However, they are correct, if this raised black floor level is intentional, its not a bug. When I get the time Ill do a full suggestion report for it all.

I do want to add though, Im still grateful that HDR has been added, the extra brightness looks stunning on street lights, vehicle light, reflectors etc.

[morrelo]

Thank you for the follow up, we now see that depending on the conditions the output could result in non-zero values, we will try to improve this situation for sure, it's not intended. I was just saying that it's not something that you can affect with the HDR calibration tool and it's not supposed to affect that. Btw we are using BT.2100.

[Unster]

+1. I posted a new topic "darker nights" in the suggestion forum, not in response to this but because it has been a long running problem. I see I'm not the only one feeling this way. The nights look bad, with lots of gray instead of black. The new HDR mode, that I had to disable in a run command so I can continue running RTX HDR, doesn't fix it.

[Starsky83]

Thank you Morrelo for the reply, Im sorry for the confusion I created in my initial report.

Im glad that this is being reviewed. If its not too much trouble, could I please ask that a note be made on this report once there is an outcome from the review. Just so if there is any changes I'll be sure to remove reshade to check them out.

Thanks,