Hi everyone,
I am an owner of a RADEON 5700 xt, paired with a Ryzen 5 2600 CPU and a Samsung C49HG90DMU ultrawide monitor, which I run using a DP cable. My monitor firmware, windows build, GPU drivers and BIOS (Asus x470I) are up to date.
I have trouble setting up HDR properly for video playback and for video games.
At least for videos HDR works in some instances. After having made sure, that my setup meets all the requirements for HDR ( checking compatibility and recognition of my monitor via dxdiag textfile, installing HEVC video extension from microsoft store, checking HDCP support status in Radeon settings) I got it working in Chrome for Youtube content.
When enabling HDR in windows, everything looks dull, pinkish/ redish and washed out. However, when playing HDR videos in Youtube colors and brightness get a noticable bump compared with SDR playback of the same video. It gets to a point, where I even lose some details on bright scenes due to my monitors only 600nits peak brightness I guess. Other than that this is the only case where HDR works as intended.
When I try to get games working, the picture remains in the washed out state. I have tried numerous games included in my Xbox Game pass, which I got with my GPU (thanks AMD). I tried Final Fantasy XV windows edition, Monster Hunter World and Sea of Thieves and Sekiro so far. All with the same outcome: there is no adjustment happening from the image being dull, grey and washed out to being vivid and colorfull.
Some of these games allow me to adjust contrast, color and brightness, when HDR is enabled, which I can use to compensate for the overall dullness, however after all manual tuning I can still see that the baseline of what I had to work with was that washed out picture.
A little buggy way to work my way around this issue was to enable HDR in windows, let HDR output kick in and disable HDR on windows again. In some situations, like having Youtube in Google Chrome still in HDR mode, the picture remains vivid. But today I have compared that glitched HDR output with HDR actually enabled. There is definetively even more detail lost for brighter spots in the glitched version. That was no suprise tho as there is no way of manually enabling HDR mode within my monitor's options. It switches automatically when such input is detected.
Most of the listed games won't even show an HDR option when HDR in WIndows settings is disabled from the beginning or afterwards.
The only other game, that let me glitch into HDR without enabling it in windows, was PUBG. By modifying the settings file I could force HDR output for this game. When in fullscreen mode, it still dulls the image and HDR is detected by my monitor, but something intresting happens, when I put the game into window mode by pressing alt+enter. Although not detected as an HDR signal by my monitor, compared with when the game is launched in SDR mode, it is more vivid, colorfull and it does that thing when looking directly into the sun, mimicing being blinded. It feels like I am as close to what HDR should look like as I was when glitching Youtube in Chrome while my monitor is not in HDR mode.
It is a similar thing with Netflix: When HDR is enabled in windows and HDR content played in either the Windows Store version of Netflix or in Edge browser, by pressing ctrl+alt+shift+q I can see that I recieve an HDR video via the HEVC codec. Opposite to what is succesfully managed by Chrome and Youtube the Image remains dull and faded like the rest of my desktop. After disabling HDR in windows and resuming the playback, the HDR input remains and looks way more vivid than the SDR output. However, the monitor is no longer in HDR mode. I suspect that here again I only get a little close to what HDR is supposed to look like.
What I got from all that is, that something is very fishy with how HDR is treated by windows.
Even if 10 bit SDR content looks amazing on my panel as it is, it was a different story entirely, when HDR is kicking in properly.
I have heared that for some people in the green team even when windows is in HDR mode, SDR content is still displayed correctly without the need of the SDR brightness slider in windows settings. That implies, that for those Windows is able to differentiate between SDR content and HDR content properly in HDR mode.
Six months ago I returned my 5700xt because of this and wanted to give it another try.
Is there any way to fix my HDR with AMD hardware?
