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I believe the article is based on a wrong assumption. The author argues that everything could look more realistic and that VFX could pop more with stronger HDR, but in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to keep a stylized cartoon game also stylized in its brightness choices.

When you drive towards the sun, what is more fun? A realistic HDR brightness that blinds you, or a „wrong“ brightness level that helps the background stay in the background without interrupting your flow? Similarly, should eye candy like little sparks grab your attention by being the brightest object on screen? I’d say no.

The hardware can handle full HDR and more brightness, but one could argue that the game is more fun with incorrect brightness scaling…

> But when Gamers in ESA surveys report that the quality of the graphics being the #2 factor in deciding when to purchase a game

Somehow I doubt this survey is representative of the typical Mario Kart player. And to those for whom it is a concern, I don't think SDR is high on the list relative to framerate, pop-in, and general "see where I'm going and need to go next" usability.

I personally find HDR as one of the most impactful recent display tech, but there are plenty of hoops to jump through before you get to that experience.

You need a real HDR display (800 nits+), FALD or OLED for contrast, some calibration, and software that uses it well (really hit and miss at least on Windows).

Once all the stars align, the experience is amazing. Doom Eternal has one of the best HDR implementations on PC, and I suggest trying it once on a good display before writing HDR off as a gimmick.

There’s something about how taillights of a car in a dark street in Cyberpunk look, and that just can’t be replicated on an SDR display afaict.

Then you have some games where it’s implemented terribly and it looks washed out and worse than SDR. Some people go through the pain and mod them to look right, or you just disable HDR with those.

I’d vouch for proper HDR any day, that being said I wouldn’t expect it to improve Mario Kart much even with a proper implementation. The art style of the game itself is super bright for that cheery mood, and no consumer display will be able to show 1000nits with 99% of the frame at full brightness. It’ll likely look almost the same as SDR.

Fair point I suppose, but honestly I don't really care. The game looks plenty bright and colorful and Mario-y, and I certainly never stopped to notice banding in the sky or lack of detail in the clouds.

There are about a thousand other things in any given game that matter more to me than HDR tone mapping, and I'm happy for developers to focus on those things. The one exception might be a game where you spend a lot of time in the dark - like Resident Evil or Luigi's mansion.

Looking at his example video where he compares Godfall Ultimate footage to Mario Kart - I quite dislike the HDR in Godfall Ultimate. Certain elements like health bars, red crystals, and sparks are emphasized way too much, to the detraction of character and environment design. I find Mario Kart to be much more tasteful. That's not to say that Mario Kart World couldn't be better looking in HDR, but the author doesn't really do a compelling job showing how. In the side-by-side examples with "real" HDR, I prefer the game as-is.

The intrinsic research and analysis behind this article are great. I’m having a hard time, though, not tripping over the obvious (tell me I’m wrong!) ChatGPT “polish”. Multilevel tutorial outlines, bolded key points, “X is Y—not Z”, …

I can’t articulate why it bothers me. Except maybe the implied assumption that the author’s real voice & style benefit more than they are harmed from being submerged in what is ultimately mathematically derived mush.

There's someone that did the job to actually figuring out how to make the HDR of the switch work, but it needs your display to support certain features to be correct https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X84e14oe6gs

> HDR is mainstream – From just a quick browsing of BestBuy, nearly all TVs over 42” are 4K and support HDR. 9th gen consoles are shipping with HDR on by default. The majority of your audience is HDR-equipped.

"Mainstream" or "majority" in context of Nintendo is a $20-40k/yr white collar household with 2 kids. The REAL mainstream. Some would have real ashtrays on a dining table. ~None of them had bought any of TVs over 42" with 4K resolution and HDR support in past 10 years.

Though, I do wonder how globally mainstream is such a household buying Nintendo hardware. Admittedly it could be somewhat of a local phenomenon.

HDR video/images in the macOS/iOS browser have to be one of the most confusing UX in recent memory.

Why are people able to craft an image/video that bypasses my screen brightness and color shift settings?

If I wanted to see the media in full fidelity, I wouldn't have my screen dimmed with nightshift turned on in my dark bedroom.

It's not OP's fault. My mind is just blown every time I see this behavior.

The most unpleasant effect from cut-rate HDR is when graphics with bright backgrounds get lazy-mapped to HDR.

Perhaps the worst offender I've ever seen was the Mafia remake by Hangar 17, which loads every time with a sequence of studio logos with white backgrounds that cut from black. The RGB(255,255,255) backgrounds get stretched to maximum HDR nits, and the jump from RGB(0,0,0) (especially on an OLED) is absolutely eye-searing.

I literally had to close my eyes whenever I'd load the game.

> You might look at the HDR representations of this game and think “Wait, the game appears more colorful” and this is because of the Hunt Effect. The Hunt Effect describes how we think a brighter color is more saturated, but in reality, it’s just an optical illusion.

Sounds like an incredibly cost-effective optical illusion!

Literally only makes a difference to the clouds. Nintendo know what they're doing and made the right call

Nintendo really seems to dislike dithering their intermediate buffers for some reason. Their first party titles often have quite visible banding artifacts. Dithering is easy and cheap and solves it completely.

Here's some good examples: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MslGR8

Don’t disagree with the findings wrt MKW specifically, but PSA that, in general, HDR on the Switch 2 can be substantially improved by enabling HGIG tonemapping on TVs which support it, then going through the HDR calibration steps again. HDTVTest covered it here: https://youtu.be/X84e14oe6gs?si=bh1U7OHxGlzzJO8w

Interesting article and it's great that it touches on colour science concepts. IMO "HDR" is one of the most commonly misunderstood and butchered graphics terms out there. A lot of people who probably should understand it (artists, photographers, designers, computer graphics engineers) don't understand it. Like the author mentions, the industry has been stuck in SDR world for historical reasons and probably because SDR is a fudge that looks good enough most of the time. Hence a proliferation of poor understanding and poor colour pipelines. Also, interestingly, even with decent colour science there is still an art to it, so you can do a lot of things which are half correct and it doesn't obviously look bad to most people.

What surprised me is why a new game from a big studio, designed to support "HDR", would not be designed all in linear space to begin with. Because then doing tone mapping correctly for different display technologies becomes easy. However my knowledge is mostly from the photography world so perhaps someone with game knowledge can weigh in.

It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, color was new and being done poorly. Now Oz is nostalgic so it gets a pass because of its uniqueness, but new films that look like that would be a little absurd.

I like some of the choices on Mario Kart World with HDR, but a lot of it just needs to be toned down so the things which do blow out the colors are impressive but also fit instead of just everything being turned up to 11.

I have never owned a gaming console, and I was actually considering getting the Switch 2 as a casual gamer to play with friends/family.

My first reaction when I saw the launch/gameplay video was why does this look so washed out? Now I kinda know why - thank you!

This is a game on a handheld

You want low latency and long battery life, HDR has an impact on the two

Have people forgotten what a handheld is supposed to be? portable device on a battery

Interesting how the images pop on that site, everything else has like lower opacity/faded, worked great, maybe more noticable on retina monitors

I’m glad to see this getting attention in the last day or two. HDRVTest did a video too.

I’m having a blast with MarioKart but the track usually looks washed out. Some of the UI and other things have great color on them but most of the picture just looks like the saturation was turned down a bit.

Very disappointing as a Mario game and its colorful aesthetic is the kind of thing that should be able to look great in HDR.

Nintendo has never competed on graphics. They compete on having the most fun, accessible, entertaining games as possible. And say what you will about their business practices, they’ve probably done a better job of that than any other gaming company in history. As more devs bundle ever higher quality graphics with ever higher in-app purchases and pay to win schemes, Mario remains…Mario.

I seriously doubt many Switch users would bail on the system because of “fake” HDR. They probably don’t care about HDR at all. As long as Mario remains Mario, they’re happy.

Nintendo cheaped out just so they can resell the same thing to the people obsessed with their branding

Anything that isn’t an oled simply cannot do HDR. it’s just physically impossible to get the real contrast.