Following the debut of HDR10+ GAMING in Nexon’s looter shooter game The First Descendant, an Unreal Engine 5 plugin is now available to all game developers to facilitate integration.
Bill Mandel, co-manager of HDR10+ Technologies LLC, stated:
We are pleased to provide this new Unreal Engine plug-in directly to studios and developers to allow faster access to HDR10+ games on certified monitors and televisions. We believe this new plug-in will further expand the adoption of HDR10+ GAMING across the industry.
As some may already know, HDR10+ is the equivalent format to Dolby Vision. While the basic HDR10 only offers static metadata, meaning that the High Dynamic Range information is fixed for the full video and does not adapt to the specifics of the user’s display, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision enable dynamic metadata, allowing adjustments of brightness levels on a frame-by-frame basis. Moreover, the dynamic metadata enables proper calibration even for HDR displays of lower brightness capabilities, avoiding the cumbersome necessity of manual user setups.
Both of these have long been issues for HDR aficionados, leading to a long string bad implementations, especially for PC games (which sometimes do not even support HDR until mods add that functionality).
HDR10+ GAMING aims to fix all that with this plugin, providing certification for devices based on a standard protocol to solve this potential problem and allowing a premium HDR game experience for both game developers and players. The HDR10+ Technologies group has outlined these key benefits:
- Hassle-free, automatic HDR display calibration
- Optimized dynamic HDR game rendering for a variety of displays
- Low latency
- Reduction of QA time and resources. Single QA test for all HDR10+ GAMING compatible displays
The plugin is currently only compatible with PCs equipped with an NVIDIA RTX or GTX 16 Series GPU since it utilizes the latest NVIDIA HDR NVAPI SDK driver. At the time, NVIDIA said:
HDR10+ is especially beneficial as games and other content can query HDR luminance and color information directly from the display to perform dynamic tone mapping that is optimal for each display’s HDR capabilities, helping to faithfully reproduce the artistic intent of content creators and consistently deliver great HDR experiences for GeForce gamers.
Game developers interested in using the HDR10+ GAMING plugin should also keep in mind that it works right away only with Unreal Engine 5.2.1 and 5.3.0; other versions will require building their own plugin based on the source code.
Needless to say, whether user or developer, you’ll have to own an HDR10+ GAMING display, such as Samsung monitors from Odyssey 7 series and above and TV models from Q70 series and 120Hz above from last year and this year.
Dolby had previously released Unreal Engine plugins for its Vision and Atmos technologies in late June. Let’s hope that game developers take advantage of these plugins to add dynamic metadata in future games, making HDR gaming what it should have been in the first place.
