HDR analysis and setup guide for #007FirstLight on PC and Xbox (and PS5). Setup guide at the end. I have not tried it on PS5, but it most likely is implemented exactly the same on PS5 as it is on Xbox/PC. I really like the game, but HDR is not implemented in a way I like. The games highligts are very dim on higher nits displays, so it does not utilize higher nits displays capabilities (above 800-1000 nits). Its also very un-intuitive to setup for gamers, because setting up paper white / brightness is not decoupled from peak brightness. And highlights gets clipped as we move up the brigtness slider. The game does look much better with HDR than in SDR. Thats for sure. HDR peak brightness: The game automatically gets the peak brightness from Xbox's HDR system calibration, Windows HDR calibration app (and most likely also from PS5s HDR system settings). I have tested up to 2500 nits, but the game might output much higher. The game will not output higher nits than this value. It clips everything above. Black levels: The game has great black levels in darker scenes and the brightness slider does not effect it. However, the game uses a lot of tiny layer of fog and a brown color filter that raises black levels in some scenes. That is an artistic choice. I do find some scenes quite ugly with poor contrast because of this. Other scenes look great. Don't worry about the black levels. They are fine and we can't change them anyway. Paper White (brightness): In-game we only have one slider. Its a brightness or paper white slider. It will have the value from zero to your peak brightness. So if you have set peak brightness to 1000 nits, the slider will show 1000 nits. If you have set peak brightness to 1500 nits, the slider will show 1500 nits. It increases everything from upper shadows, midtones and highlights. What it does is to push everything upwards, except black levels, as we increase the slider. Its means brighter lightsources gets pushed up against the ceiling, peak brigtness. Everything above peak brightness gets clipped so we lose detail in brighter highligts if we increase it too much. I don't like when a brightness / paper white slider is not decoupled from peak brightness. It makes it very difficult to setup HDR for gamers and it means we wont get to utilize our displays peak brightness (see Brightness Output section below), unless we are so lucky that the paper white we want gets us the peak brightness we want. I instead want a brightness / paper white slider to mostly adjust midtones. Everything above paper white and up to peak brightness should be compressed or stretched in a non-liniar way as we adjust midtones. Brightness output: Below I show what the game outputs in the brightest lightsources I could find in the Q-lap and Crash site scenes. I will show pictures from the two scenes in my next post so you can see the lightsources I tested. As we can see gamers with higher nits displays are getting significantly lower brightness output in highlights, depending on brightness set on the slider, than gamers with lower nits displays (below 1000 nits). Most lightsources are much dimmer than the tested lightsources. See the 4 pictures below from the Night Club scene. Picture 1 and 3 are with 2000 nits peak brightness and 400 nits on the brightness slider. The game here only outputs 1000-1200 nits in the brightest lightsouces in the scene (picture 1) and 720 nits in the neon lights in the bar (picture 2). Picture 2 and 4 are with 1000 nits peak brightness and 250 nits on the brightness slider. The game only outputs a max of 760 nits in picture 2 and 460 nits in picture 4. Q-lap: 500/150=450 500/(180-500)=500 800/200=736 800/(230-800)=800 1000/200=750 1000/250=880 1000/(300-1000)=1000 1500/200=820 1500/250=1000 1500/300=1160 1500/430-1500=1500 2000/250=1040 2000/300=1230 2000/400=1550 2000/500=1840 2000/((570-2000)=2000 2500/190=800 2500/240=1000 2500/300=1240 2500/370=1500 2500/520=2000 2500/640=2300 2500(730-2500)=2500 Crash site: 1000/200=720 1000/250=840 1000/360-1000=1000 2000/200=900 2000/300=1300 2000/400=1630 2000/500=1900 2000/560-2000=2000 Setup guide: First make sure your peak brightness is setup to what your display can do on a 2-10% window. Its a starting point. Then setup the overall brigtness, using the in-game brightness slider, to what looks most natural to you. When doing this, also look at bright bigger lightsources to see if detail gets clipped. Stop increasing the brightness slider if highlights gets clipped. When you have done that, you can chose to use the above data for peak brightness output to further increase your peak brightness. It can also help with some clipping. Use the above peak brightness output to get a better understanding of the games peak brightness output.