[2019] HDR is still broken. Can we get any updates on this?

With the graphics settings reset bug making the rounds, I thought I’d ask if we can get any update at all on fixes for HDR rendering in D2. While it may be a niche problem, it has never worked quite right. I finally gave up and disabled it, but it’s now being turned on every time I launch the game.

For those unaware, D2’s HDR is extremely sensitive to blown out whites and “crushed” blacks. In both cases, where there should be gradation and detail, the game basically “rounds up” or down to white or black. You lose detail in bright places and the many dark corridors in the game become very difficult to navigate. Finding the exact settings is trial and error at best, and still leads to less than optimal results.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the HDR Brightness settings in the game are broken, as they are affected by the Brightness setting when HDR is off. This means if your Brightness was set to “3” before you turned on HDR, when you enable it and go to adjust your brightness, the displayed settings will be different than if you had Brightness set to “4” before you enabled HDR. This is completely unintuitive and is not explained anywhere in the game.

I have been able to tune three separate displays to make HDR more or less “work”, but there are still instances where detail gets lost. For an otherwise polished and highly beautiful game, this is really disappointing.

Please, please, please, Bungie. Can we get an update?

Edit: typos

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Hi there! I'm the person you can blame for letting these issues leave our walls and get into the wild.

The current items I'm aware of that I would like to address:

SDR brightness setting affects the HDR image, requiring you to sanitize it to neutral before using HDR
The HDR black point is setting is functionally unusable and should be left to its default setting, ignoring the calibration
Certain combinations of white/black point values can cause subtle colour inversions in the very dark range of values

Some of the above problems tend to be triangular dependencies, making them less than trivial to address.
I am still hopeful we can find a way to responsibly allocate the technical resources towards these efforts, it's just a matter of finding the right timing so that we don't starve other critical efforts of the same required resources.

In the meantime we have begun to standardize our minimum level of brightness in gameplay areas, so that we can more consistently author areas that were otherwise challenging as artists reviewed content in varying real-world lighting conditions and displays. Hopefully you saw version of a more consistent minimum brightness in Shadowkeep content. This consistent baseline is also going to help make the engineering solutions more viable to implement moving forward — this makes me happy!

I apologize that we've allowed this to become a problem that yourself (and other HDR players) have to deal with, rather than the game. I take responsibility for this.

Until we're able to implement fixes, following these steps should improve your experience

Keep the SDR brightness at default when using HDR
Leave the HDR blackpoint to default
Set the HDR white point to taste

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