Comment on Am I doing HDR wrong?
conciselyverbose@kbin.social 6 months ago
HDR stands for high dynamic range. It means you can have detail in shadows and highlights without losing detail in the middle.
At the end of the day, it's just how your computer or console talks to the display. It doesn't change what your display is capable of. It can't magically make colors more vibrant, for example. What it does instead, with a quality display, is allow you to make specific colors more vibrant while keeping their detail, without losing it elsewhere. It should usually be subtle, except in specific showcases designed to push the edges of what HDR can do.
It also doesn't make a mediocre display not mediocre. If it can't accurately present the whole range, receiving it doesn't help a lot.
stu@lemmy.pit.ninja 6 months ago
Yeah, the difference should be easily visible assuming one has quality source material and a nice display. I was kind of assuming OP was talking about using the Steam Deck in docked mode, but maybe that was a bad assumption.
Cralder@feddit.nu 6 months ago
Sorry I should have been more clear. I’m using the steam deck oled with the regular display, not an external display.
conciselyverbose@kbin.social 6 months ago
Someone else said the actual OLED doesn't support it. I never paid attention because I talked myself out of needing one, but if that's the case you obviously wouldn't see it on the deck screen.
I think you'd run into the limitations of render quality for most stuff 3D, though. There might be 2D games that play with it, and I'm guessing there are demo videos. I know my first (non-HDR) OLED I enjoyed trying some OLED demo clips out to really see what it could do.
Cralder@feddit.nu 6 months ago
The oled deck does support hdr, dont know why some people are claiming ut doesn’t.
General HDR is not supported in Linux yet though, only in games. So videos are unfortunately not a thing I can use for comparison.
averyminya@beehaw.org 6 months ago
The ability to display HDR mapping and actually being HDR are two different things which leads to this confusion a lot.
The Steam Deck (OLED) can display HDR, but it itself is not “true” HDR, essentially due to the nit output of the screen.
This is why things often look weird with HDR (in general on non-HDR monitors) - it suggests there’s the capability of showing the HDR mapping but there is no support from the display to make sense of the mapping. This is when things look washed out or have a soft of halo shimmering effect.
From my understanding, the OLED is able to display HDR content mapping natively, but itself is not true HDR (basically due to not being bright enough). An example of this in action would be Spider-Man OLED Native (1), Spider-Man OLED Docked with a true HDR display (2), with Spider-Man non-oled HDR on (3) (if possible) and HDR off (4) for reference.
With 1), you see the Steam Deck’s ability to display HDR
With 2), you see the displays ability to display HDR
With 3), you see what HDR looks like on a non HDR display
With 4) you see what HDR looks like on a HDR display
Basically, the Steam Deck screen can display HDR content but isn’t true HDR because it caps out at 1,000 nits. External displays supporting HDR can take advantage of it, and generally even HDR-lite still “looks good”. There’s a number of monitor manufacturers that claim HDR but it’s actually HDR-400. IIRC the Steam Deck is HDR-1000, but true HDR can go all the way to 4,000 nits which is why the Deck isn’t “true” HDR.
This is all just my understanding from information I’ve gathered over time and I’m likely somewhat inaccurate, but I think overall it’s a good guideline that explains the differences.
Hope that clears things up!