HDR is the biggest improvement you can make to the visuals rofl. It’s only a meme on sh**ty displays, and trust me I’ve been there plenty of times.

Full HDR is a pipedream, no, you cant have genuine HDR with a 2500 nits display because in that case, you’re talking about LED, therefore its lowest point is not 0, and on monitors its even worse.

Higher Dynamic Range than the common standard is good, its better than last gen SDR, but this whole HDR debacle looks like a dog chasing its tail, OLED is the only one capable of doing genuine HDR with absolute uniform zeros and as you said, usually peaking at 1000 nits.

10000 nits devices are NOT standard so idk wtf you’re talking about, perhaps google the word standard, it’s theoretically possible but not common and not cheap, and not genuine hdr if it isnt OLED or MicroLED.

I never said you could show 10000 nits content on a less capable display (1000 nits), at least not without dynamic tonemaping. I’m only saying that 10000 nits HDR standard is out there, and Sony already showcased 10000 nits display. Of course, the current generation of HDR TVs that are available on the market are far less capable, because they can only show up to 2000-2500 nits, and average OLED is even less impressive (around 500-1000 nits).

VLC 100% supports 10-bit HDR video playback. I use it and SMPlayer to preview HDR gameplay videos that I record.

Here’s how I use SpecialK to tonemap SDR videos to HDR in VLC:
1. Download and install the latest SpecialK from Discord https://discord.com/channels/778539700981071872/933778877996757033
2. Launch the SpecialK Injection Frontend (SKIF), and add VLC to it by clicking “Add Game” in the lower-left.
3. Select VLC in the list of “Games” in SKIF, and click the “Launch” button in the lower-right (this will launch VLC and inject the SpecialK DLL when VLC loads a video).
4. Open an SDR video in VLC that you want to watch in HDR.
5. When the video plays, you should see SpecialK inject and display a message (similar to what ReShade does) at the top of the video playback area.
6. Hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys on your keyboard, and tap Backspace to open the SpecialK configuration.
7. Go to the HDR menu in SpecialK and make sure the “SpecialK Luminance” slider is maxed out, then click on the “HDR Setup” button.
8. More settings should pop up in the upper-right corner of the video playback area. Make sure the HDR Calibration is set for “scRGB HDR”, and then go back to the main settings and click the “HDR Setup” button again to hide the extra HDR settings.
9. You can press Ctrl+Shift+Backspace again to close the SpecialK UI and go back to your video.

Note: You may have to close VLC Media Player after you change HDR settings, and then reopen it via SKIF before those changes take effect. Once you do, you should be able to enjoy watching your SDR content in HDR as long as HDR mode is turned on in Windows and you’re watching on an HDR monitor.

Many people never seen HDR on good display (and you absolutely need good monitor/TV for HDR), or they just think it’s fake brightness, when in fact HDR allows you to see real detail that would otherwise be hidden. SDR content can only show details between 0-100 nits, while HDR 0-1000 and even up to 0-10000 nits. SDR content has this washed out look that I started to hate when I realized what I was missing.

-> https://gothamknights.bugs.wbgames.com/patch-notes

One of section in patch notes

Rendering performance improvements
Smoothed out delta time fluctuations with and without V-SYNC
Streaming time improvements
Optimized actor spawn time and performance
Various GPU and CPU hitches reduction

you cant show 10000 nits if your display only goes up to 1000 nits dont be silly

I don’t think most people are aware that TV’s (and thus TV shows and movies) normally only have limited color pallets, instead of the entire RGB spectrum. HDR doesn’t just give you more contrast and brightness, it also increases the number of colors available in the video making things look more realistic. My monitor does fairly amazing looking bright colors in HDR, but it fails a bit on the dark colors (it’s an IPS panel so not as nice as a good OLED display), however when I tonemap things into HDR with SpecialK the colors look better in general (I do decrease saturation back down to 100% after they changed how they process the SDR to HDR tonemapping because it oversaturates a bit now).

It’s like saying that having more colours is a bad thing. HDR make’s a huge difference. In Shadow Of The Tomb raider even flat textures starts looking more detailed in HDR. Crysis 1 remastered in SDR, has a too much colour saturation and a flat contrast, but in HDR everything comes to life. Also dark games benefits from HDR. For example in dead space remake you can barely see anything in SDR because of black crush, so you need to use a flashlight, but in HDR you can everything in the dark and easily play without flashlight. Such realistic black depth is simply not possible on SDR, and also rec709 colors looks washed out compared with rec2020 (HDR)

Please tell me how this works; I use VLC to watch 10-bit HDR movies, eventhough people online keep telling me VLC doesn’t support it. It’s odd. But watching SDR movies in HDR sounds even better.