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From SDR to 'Fake HDR': Mario Kart World on Switch 2

123 points by ibobev 1y ago

jldugger 1y ago
> But when Gamers in ESA surveys report that the quality of the graphics being the #2 factor in deciding when to purchase a game Somehow I doubt this survey is representative of the typical Mario Kart player. And to those for whom it is a concern, I don't think SDR is high on the list relative to framerate, pop-in, and general "see where I'm going and need to go next" usability.
- Loughla 1y ago
  You are exactly right. I don't care if it's all blocks and squares. As long as I can not lag and see enough to destroy my children at the game.
  - mcphage 1y ago
    > see enough to destroy my children at the game That really is the joy of Mario Kart. You think you’re going to beat me, kid? You’re 12 and I’ve been playing Mario Kart for 30 years. (And then they do… oof)
jm20 1y ago
Nintendo has never competed on graphics. They compete on having the most fun, accessible, entertaining games as possible. And say what you will about their business practices, they’ve probably done a better job of that than any other gaming company in history. As more devs bundle ever higher quality graphics with ever higher in-app purchases and pay to win schemes, Mario remains…Mario. I seriously doubt many Switch users would bail on the system because of “fake” HDR. They probably don’t care about HDR at all. As long as Mario remains Mario, they’re happy.
- MBCook 1y ago
  I’m heavily disappointed. I’ve always been a HUGE Nintendo fan. If the system was SDR only I would be disappointed but fine. But they made it HDR. They made a big deal about it. And it doesn’t work well. It’s impossible to calibrate and ends up just looking washed out. It’s broken. And I don’t appreciate the insinuation that Nintendo fans will buy any piece of junk they put out. See: Wii U.
  - HeyMeco 1y ago
    Agree, with the HDR marketing for the Switch 2 I expected a proper implementation. Sad that they cheaped out on it but at least we got this great article out of it
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    I read the above post, and honestly thought it was satire.
  - esseph 1y ago
    https://youtu.be/X84e14oe6gs?feature=shared https://youtu.be/X84e14oe6gs?feature=shared
  - badc0ffee 1y ago
    The Wii U had terrible wifi, but I can't really say I hated it. There were some real classics on that console - Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World (although those were both eventually ported to the Switch). It played Wii games and supported all the original controllers, but output HDMI and had real power management. I still use mine to play Wii games.
    - MBCook 1y ago
      I loved mine. It had real problems but great games. It was just an easy at-hand example. I also liked the VirtualBoy. But I bought it and a bunch of game from Blockbuster for $50 total when they gave up on it. So my value calibration was very different from those who paid retail.
  - 1y ago
MBCook 1y ago
I’m glad to see this getting attention in the last day or two. HDRVTest did a video too. I’m having a blast with MarioKart but the track usually looks washed out. Some of the UI and other things have great color on them but most of the picture just looks like the saturation was turned down a bit. Very disappointing as a Mario game and its colorful aesthetic is the kind of thing that should be able to look great in HDR.
ge96 1y ago
Interesting how the images pop on that site, everything else has like lower opacity/faded, worked great, maybe more noticable on retina monitors
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  On macOS 15.5, Firefox 139 shows super dark images for me. Safari seems to work fine, though.
  - ziml77 1y ago
    I'm curious if someone knows what's going on. It feels to me like Firefox is showing the image in HDR but with the wrong gamma curve applied.
    - GRiMe2D 1y ago
      MacBook Pro can “display” HDR content on SDR displays. macOS puts a slightly higher brightness than it required and artificially (in software) changes absolute white (0xFFFFFF) to greyish color (0xEEEEEE). So when a HDR content is required it will remove mask around that content. Safari ideally, probably that’s on Firefox why tone mapping doesn’t work well
      - badc0ffee 1y ago
        There's a HDR video on that page, and on my built-in MBP display, it's much brighter/has noticeably more range than the rest of the UI. Moving the window to my non-HDR external 4k monitor, it looks like a regular YouTube video. The video looks the same in both Safari and Firefox, whereas the images are dim in Firefox on both my MBP display and external monitor.
  - genezeta 1y ago
    Firefox does not have HDR support for images. It has some support for HDR video on Mac. Support for HDR images seems to have gained some traction in latest months but seems still distant. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr
tempaway43563 1y ago
Literally only makes a difference to the clouds. Nintendo know what they're doing and made the right call
- MBCook 1y ago
  It looks more washed out than it should. I’m not talking about “doesn’t have blowout colors and brightness“. I’m talking about looks bland. How is that the right call?
  - jldugger 1y ago
    1) They have a screen built into the console. It would be kinda derpy to treat portable gaming as a second class citizen. So "SDR first" it is. 2) More than past Mario Karts, World needs to visibly delineate the track into multiple sections: the track itself, the "rough" off track, the border between those two, and the copious number of rails you can ride and trick on. Rails in particular are commonly bright primary colors in order to better stand out, often more primary color coded and saturated than the track itself. Green Pipes, yellow electrical wire tie downs, red bridge rail guards, etc. 3) Bonus gamut for particle effects is kinda not required and probably distracting when drifting around a curve avoiding attacks. 4) It feels pretty good to me, but maybe I need to adjust some settings on my LG C1 to get the full bland experience?
    - MBCook 1y ago
      The screen on it is supposed to be HDR, though I don’t know how good it is at that.
      - BearOso 1y ago
        It has a peak brightness of 400cd/m^2 and no local dimming. It's only possibly HDR-compatible by virtue of accepting an HDR signal. It can't display HDR at all. The closest thing it can do would be content-adaptive fullscreen brightness changing.
braiamp 1y ago
There's someone that did the job to actually figuring out how to make the HDR of the switch work, but it needs your display to support certain features to be correct https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X84e14oe6gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X84e14oe6gs
- MBCook 1y ago
  That only helps some. I have a display that supports that feature but I still can’t get it to look right. It’s a little better than I had it set. But it’s still a problem. As this article shows, it just wasn’t designed right.
mortenjorck 1y ago
The most unpleasant effect from cut-rate HDR is when graphics with bright backgrounds get lazy-mapped to HDR. Perhaps the worst offender I've ever seen was the Mafia remake by Hangar 17, which loads every time with a sequence of studio logos with white backgrounds that cut from black. The RGB(255,255,255) backgrounds get stretched to maximum HDR nits, and the jump from RGB(0,0,0) (especially on an OLED) is absolutely eye-searing. I literally had to close my eyes whenever I'd load the game.
- xnx 1y ago
  Even worse when you're in a dark room. The white flash when loading many otherwise dark mode websites and apps is the worst.
  - baobun 1y ago
    At least for Firefox, having the browser chrome set to dark (typically by having it picked up from GTK theme preferences) should make the default page background dark too. And I think userchrome.css to override default bgcolor should still work. Of course there are individual wonky sites which will still flash but if applicable, those two things should reduce the occurrences significantly.
- theshackleford 1y ago
  > (especially on an OLED) Why would it be any more impactful on OLED than any given FALD display capable of putting out >1000 nits sustained?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - noname120 1y ago
    Contrast ratio
    - theshackleford 1y ago
fxtentacle 1y ago
I believe the article is based on a wrong assumption. The author argues that everything could look more realistic and that VFX could pop more with stronger HDR, but in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to keep a stylized cartoon game also stylized in its brightness choices. When you drive towards the sun, what is more fun? A realistic HDR brightness that blinds you, or a „wrong“ brightness level that helps the background stay in the background without interrupting your flow? Similarly, should eye candy like little sparks grab your attention by being the brightest object on screen? I’d say no. The hardware can handle full HDR and more brightness, but one could argue that the game is more fun with incorrect brightness scaling…
- MBCook 1y ago
  That’s not the problem. The game should look like a normal Mario game at a minimum. It should use its additional color palette available in HDR to look better, and the additional brightness to make make effects pop as you describe. The problem is that’s not what it’s doing. Some things pop better, but it’s not because they’re using extra colors. It may be a little brightness, but mostly it’s that everything else just got toned down so it looks kinda washed out. If they did nothing but use the expanded color palette and did not use the additional brightness at all I would be a lot happier than with what we have right now. I haven’t turned it back to SDR mode but I’m legitimately considering it. Because I suspect the game looks better that way.
  - BoorishBears 1y ago
    Mario Kart World generally looks more saturated than previous games if anything, so it definitely meets that minimum. And the article is about they missed out on the optionality of using the additional gamut, but that additional gamut wouldn't intrinsically look better. It's easy enough to edit a screenshot to show us what could have been, but even in that single screenshot there are things that look worse: like the flames gained saturation but lost the depth the smoke was adding, and some reasonable atmospheric haze vanished. (similarly the game in the side-by-side has some downright awful looking elements, like the over-saturated red crystals that punch a hole through my HDR display...) Given Nintendo's track record for stylization over raw image quality, I'm not sure why this isn't just as likely them intentionally prioritizing SDR quality and taking a modest-but-safe approach to HDR... especially when the built-in screen maxes out at 450 nits.
twoodfin 1y ago
The intrinsic research and analysis behind this article are great. I’m having a hard time, though, not tripping over the obvious (tell me I’m wrong!) ChatGPT “polish”. Multilevel tutorial outlines, bolded key points, “X is Y—not Z”, … I can’t articulate why it bothers me. Except maybe the implied assumption that the author’s real voice & style benefit more than they are harmed from being submerged in what is ultimately mathematically derived mush.
- jlarcombe 1y ago
  yes it's hard to understand why people feel the need to do this and I worry it's just going to become ubiquitous and ruin everything
- isoprophlex 1y ago
  I know why it bothers me. It's lazy. Just look at those telltale fucking bulleted lists. The same point, re-phrased slightly; the shit you thought was clever when you were 15 years old, bullshitting your way through a high school history exam. If you consider your writing bad enough to warrant a LLM fluffing pass, I consider it no better than the 99% of worse than mediocre, lazy, attention grabbing bullshit without real intellectual quality that pollutes the internet.
  - kybernetyk 1y ago
    Yeah there’s also those people who aren’t native speakers. I tend to run ChatGPT over most stuff I write because while writing in English for over 30 years now I still can’t compare to a native speaker. Call it lazy but I think for the reader reading a rephrased LLM article is more enjoyable than trying to parse some borderline “Kauderwelsch”(German for gibberish) :)
    - 1123581321 1y ago
      I’m just one reader but I enjoy reading English from non-native speakers. There’s often a terse, wry or precise quality to it that native English writers won’t make the time for, since they can roll out so many idioms. Your translations are legitimate contributions to the English-language community.
numpad0 1y ago
> HDR is mainstream – From just a quick browsing of BestBuy, nearly all TVs over 42” are 4K and support HDR. 9th gen consoles are shipping with HDR on by default. The majority of your audience is HDR-equipped. "Mainstream" or "majority" in context of Nintendo is a $20-40k/yr white collar household with 2 kids. The REAL mainstream. Some would have real ashtrays on a dining table. ~None of them had bought any of TVs over 42" with 4K resolution and HDR support in past 10 years. Though, I do wonder how globally mainstream is such a household buying Nintendo hardware. Admittedly it could be somewhat of a local phenomenon.
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  I don't know how out of touch you have to be to think a family with two kids making $20k a year is affording a switch 2 on release.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - numpad0 1y ago
    Japanese average income is $32k, the JP special of Switch 2 is $350, Switch 1 sold 37m, and Japanese working age population under is ~74m(out of 120m). Either six-figure Nintendo gamers are hoarding boxes full of Switch 1 in the attic and completely destroying the statistics, or everyone at that income bracket is sophisticated enough to desire one. Frankly, this is why I'm wondering how normal it is globally, because I believe Japan is not supposed to be a village of broke Vulcans. Maybe the nerds are in fact hoarding tons of Switches.
    - thinkingtoilet 1y ago
      My bad. I didn't know you were talking about Japan. I assumed you were talking about America.
- epcoa 1y ago
  Not sure why you would associate “white collar” with poverty. While technically there are poor office workers, this is not the typical association.
jekwoooooe 1y ago
Nintendo cheaped out just so they can resell the same thing to the people obsessed with their branding Anything that isn’t an oled simply cannot do HDR. it’s just physically impossible to get the real contrast.
- Rubberducky1324 1y ago
  LCD screens with FALD (Full Array Local Dimming) can do HDR just fine. Usually they even have higher sustained brightness due to the inherent limitations of OLED.
  - jekwoooooe 1y ago
    With huge halos sure. Go watch fireworks on an lcd with local dimming even if it has thousands of dimming zones you will see huge halos which ruin contrast
colechristensen 1y ago
It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, color was new and being done poorly. Now Oz is nostalgic so it gets a pass because of its uniqueness, but new films that look like that would be a little absurd. I like some of the choices on Mario Kart World with HDR, but a lot of it just needs to be toned down so the things which do blow out the colors are impressive but also fit instead of just everything being turned up to 11.
deleted 1y ago
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danbolt 1y ago
> You might look at the HDR representations of this game and think “Wait, the game appears more colorful” and this is because of the Hunt Effect. The Hunt Effect describes how we think a brighter color is more saturated, but in reality, it’s just an optical illusion. Sounds like an incredibly cost-effective optical illusion!
hombre_fatal 1y ago
HDR video/images in the macOS/iOS browser have to be one of the most confusing UX in recent memory. Why are people able to craft an image/video that bypasses my screen brightness and color shift settings? If I wanted to see the media in full fidelity, I wouldn't have my screen dimmed with nightshift turned on in my dark bedroom. It's not OP's fault. My mind is just blown every time I see this behavior.
- gloxkiqcza 1y ago
  I consider this to be a bug. I want to view HDR content with brightness differences scaled in a way that the maximum value barely, if at all, exceeds the set display brightness. The fact that it just goes full 1600 nits blast when you view a video from a sunny day is a terrible UX in most cases and it’s the reason why I have HDR turned off for video recording, even though I might miss it later. To make matters worse, it also applies to 3rd party views.
  - eclipxe 1y ago
    I really enjoy it
- eclipxe 1y ago
  No I love this behavior. Makes the content really stand out and more enjoyable to view.
  - rideontime 1y ago
    Then you are free to turn up your brightness.
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    You might be saying that you'd prefer if all media were at full nits and color fidelity. But that's not what's being discussed here. The current implementation means that only the occasional image/video behaves that way, and only if it were crafted that way.
- 1y ago
rohansood15 1y ago
I have never owned a gaming console, and I was actually considering getting the Switch 2 as a casual gamer to play with friends/family. My first reaction when I saw the launch/gameplay video was why does this look so washed out? Now I kinda know why - thank you!
WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago
This is a game on a handheld You want low latency and long battery life, HDR has an impact on the two Have people forgotten what a handheld is supposed to be? portable device on a battery
- whatevaa 1y ago
  HDR doesn't impact processing much. Some games implement HDR toggles by rendering in HDR and using shaders to map to SDR when needed, apparently.
- Firehawke 1y ago
  Then why even have a HDR display as the handheld screen itself? Come ON.
  - WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago
    it perhaps was less expensive to produce on a mass scale the game perhaps started development when they had a different screen planned for the console? according to rumors, the console is at least 1year late i'm just pointing out a fact, i'm not saying that everything they do make sense
    - simoncion 1y ago
      > it perhaps was less expensive to produce on a mass scale It might be true that an HDR-capable panel was cheaper than one that was only SDR-capable. That doesn't mean that Nintendo was obligated to incur the (probably very modest) increase in energy drain from additional processing load and (probably quite a bit less modest) increase in energy drain from making the screen far brighter on average than when running in SDR mode. They could have just run the panel in SDR mode and limited HDR mode to when one was running on AC power in a dock. Or even never enabled HDR mode at all. NOTE: I've not looked into whether or not enabling HDR in a given game has a significant effect on battery life. I'm also a big fan of manufacturers and game developers creating good HDR-capable hardware and publishing good HDR-capable software whenever they reasonably can. Higher contrast ratios and (-IMO- more importantly) wider color gamuts are just nice.
freetime2 1y ago
Fair point I suppose, but honestly I don't really care. The game looks plenty bright and colorful and Mario-y, and I certainly never stopped to notice banding in the sky or lack of detail in the clouds. There are about a thousand other things in any given game that matter more to me than HDR tone mapping, and I'm happy for developers to focus on those things. The one exception might be a game where you spend a lot of time in the dark - like Resident Evil or Luigi's mansion. Looking at his example video where he compares Godfall Ultimate footage to Mario Kart - I quite dislike the HDR in Godfall Ultimate. Certain elements like health bars, red crystals, and sparks are emphasized way too much, to the detraction of character and environment design. I find Mario Kart to be much more tasteful. That's not to say that Mario Kart World couldn't be better looking in HDR, but the author doesn't really do a compelling job showing how. In the side-by-side examples with "real" HDR, I prefer the game as-is.
throawayonthe 1y ago
[dead]
darkteflon 1y ago
Don’t disagree with the findings wrt MKW specifically, but PSA that, in general, HDR on the Switch 2 can be substantially improved by enabling HGIG tonemapping on TVs which support it, then going through the HDR calibration steps again. HDTVTest covered it here: https://youtu.be/X84e14oe6gs?si=bh1U7OHxGlzzJO8w https://youtu.be/X84e14oe6gs?si=bh1U7OHxGlzzJO8w
aranelsurion 1y ago
I personally find HDR as one of the most impactful recent display tech, but there are plenty of hoops to jump through before you get to that experience. You need a real HDR display (800 nits+), FALD or OLED for contrast, some calibration, and software that uses it well (really hit and miss at least on Windows). Once all the stars align, the experience is amazing. Doom Eternal has one of the best HDR implementations on PC, and I suggest trying it once on a good display before writing HDR off as a gimmick. There’s something about how taillights of a car in a dark street in Cyberpunk look, and that just can’t be replicated on an SDR display afaict. Then you have some games where it’s implemented terribly and it looks washed out and worse than SDR. Some people go through the pain and mod them to look right, or you just disable HDR with those. I’d vouch for proper HDR any day, that being said I wouldn’t expect it to improve Mario Kart much even with a proper implementation. The art style of the game itself is super bright for that cheery mood, and no consumer display will be able to show 1000nits with 99% of the frame at full brightness. It’ll likely look almost the same as SDR.
- tokinonagare 1y ago
  On the other hand I find it the lamest and most annoying "feature" of the last 10 years. The article itself is a good demonstration (at least on my M1 MBP): as soon as an image has a single pixels row displayed, the luminosity of the whole page fades, and the reverse happens when no image is in sight. The comparison video is the first time ever I see the tech doing anything else than changing the luminosity of the screen.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  This is the problem we have right now. Cheap nasty displays that put HDR on the box and are totally trash. Most people aren't buying $4000 Sony OLED TVs, they're buying the $300 SANGUULQ brand on Black Friday sale at Wal-mart. One reason for keeping Apple hardware around is a decent display test bench. I do the best I can with image work, but once it leaves your hands it's a total lottery.
- cco 1y ago
  HDR means my phone will blind me at night and my laptop screen will be super bright in some parts and dim on others. So far this is my experience of HDR.
ratmeadow 1y ago
Interesting article and it's great that it touches on colour science concepts. IMO "HDR" is one of the most commonly misunderstood and butchered graphics terms out there. A lot of people who probably should understand it (artists, photographers, designers, computer graphics engineers) don't understand it. Like the author mentions, the industry has been stuck in SDR world for historical reasons and probably because SDR is a fudge that looks good enough most of the time. Hence a proliferation of poor understanding and poor colour pipelines. Also, interestingly, even with decent colour science there is still an art to it, so you can do a lot of things which are half correct and it doesn't obviously look bad to most people. What surprised me is why a new game from a big studio, designed to support "HDR", would not be designed all in linear space to begin with. Because then doing tone mapping correctly for different display technologies becomes easy. However my knowledge is mostly from the photography world so perhaps someone with game knowledge can weigh in.
user____name 1y ago
Nintendo really seems to dislike dithering their intermediate buffers for some reason. Their first party titles often have quite visible banding artifacts. Dithering is easy and cheap and solves it completely. Here's some good examples: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MslGR8 https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MslGR8

123 points by ibobev 1y ago

> But when Gamers in ESA surveys report that the quality of the graphics being the #2 factor in deciding when to purchase a game Somehow I doubt this survey is representative of the typical Mario Kart player. And to those for whom it is a concern, I don't think SDR is high on the list relative to framerate, pop-in, and general "see where I'm going and need to go next" usability.

Loughla 1y ago
You are exactly right. I don't care if it's all blocks and squares. As long as I can not lag and see enough to destroy my children at the game.
- mcphage 1y ago
  > see enough to destroy my children at the game That really is the joy of Mario Kart. You think you’re going to beat me, kid? You’re 12 and I’ve been playing Mario Kart for 30 years. (And then they do… oof)

jm20 1y ago

Nintendo has never competed on graphics. They compete on having the most fun, accessible, entertaining games as possible. And say what you will about their business practices, they’ve probably done a better job of that than any other gaming company in history. As more devs bundle ever higher quality graphics with ever higher in-app purchases and pay to win schemes, Mario remains…Mario. I seriously doubt many Switch users would bail on the system because of “fake” HDR. They probably don’t care about HDR at all. As long as Mario remains Mario, they’re happy.

MBCook 1y ago
I’m heavily disappointed. I’ve always been a HUGE Nintendo fan. If the system was SDR only I would be disappointed but fine. But they made it HDR. They made a big deal about it. And it doesn’t work well. It’s impossible to calibrate and ends up just looking washed out. It’s broken. And I don’t appreciate the insinuation that Nintendo fans will buy any piece of junk they put out. See: Wii U.
- HeyMeco 1y ago
  Agree, with the HDR marketing for the Switch 2 I expected a proper implementation. Sad that they cheaped out on it but at least we got this great article out of it
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  I read the above post, and honestly thought it was satire.
- esseph 1y ago
  https://youtu.be/X84e14oe6gs?feature=shared https://youtu.be/X84e14oe6gs?feature=shared
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  The Wii U had terrible wifi, but I can't really say I hated it. There were some real classics on that console - Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World (although those were both eventually ported to the Switch). It played Wii games and supported all the original controllers, but output HDMI and had real power management. I still use mine to play Wii games.
  - MBCook 1y ago
    I loved mine. It had real problems but great games. It was just an easy at-hand example. I also liked the VirtualBoy. But I bought it and a bunch of game from Blockbuster for $50 total when they gave up on it. So my value calibration was very different from those who paid retail.
- 1y ago

MBCook 1y ago

I’m glad to see this getting attention in the last day or two. HDRVTest did a video too. I’m having a blast with MarioKart but the track usually looks washed out. Some of the UI and other things have great color on them but most of the picture just looks like the saturation was turned down a bit. Very disappointing as a Mario game and its colorful aesthetic is the kind of thing that should be able to look great in HDR.

ge96 1y ago

Interesting how the images pop on that site, everything else has like lower opacity/faded, worked great, maybe more noticable on retina monitors

badc0ffee 1y ago
On macOS 15.5, Firefox 139 shows super dark images for me. Safari seems to work fine, though.
- ziml77 1y ago
  I'm curious if someone knows what's going on. It feels to me like Firefox is showing the image in HDR but with the wrong gamma curve applied.
  - GRiMe2D 1y ago
    MacBook Pro can “display” HDR content on SDR displays. macOS puts a slightly higher brightness than it required and artificially (in software) changes absolute white (0xFFFFFF) to greyish color (0xEEEEEE). So when a HDR content is required it will remove mask around that content. Safari ideally, probably that’s on Firefox why tone mapping doesn’t work well
    - badc0ffee 1y ago
      There's a HDR video on that page, and on my built-in MBP display, it's much brighter/has noticeably more range than the rest of the UI. Moving the window to my non-HDR external 4k monitor, it looks like a regular YouTube video. The video looks the same in both Safari and Firefox, whereas the images are dim in Firefox on both my MBP display and external monitor.
- genezeta 1y ago
  Firefox does not have HDR support for images. It has some support for HDR video on Mac. Support for HDR images seems to have gained some traction in latest months but seems still distant. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr

tempaway43563 1y ago

Literally only makes a difference to the clouds. Nintendo know what they're doing and made the right call

MBCook 1y ago
It looks more washed out than it should. I’m not talking about “doesn’t have blowout colors and brightness“. I’m talking about looks bland. How is that the right call?
- jldugger 1y ago
  1) They have a screen built into the console. It would be kinda derpy to treat portable gaming as a second class citizen. So "SDR first" it is. 2) More than past Mario Karts, World needs to visibly delineate the track into multiple sections: the track itself, the "rough" off track, the border between those two, and the copious number of rails you can ride and trick on. Rails in particular are commonly bright primary colors in order to better stand out, often more primary color coded and saturated than the track itself. Green Pipes, yellow electrical wire tie downs, red bridge rail guards, etc. 3) Bonus gamut for particle effects is kinda not required and probably distracting when drifting around a curve avoiding attacks. 4) It feels pretty good to me, but maybe I need to adjust some settings on my LG C1 to get the full bland experience?
  - MBCook 1y ago
    The screen on it is supposed to be HDR, though I don’t know how good it is at that.
    - BearOso 1y ago
      It has a peak brightness of 400cd/m^2 and no local dimming. It's only possibly HDR-compatible by virtue of accepting an HDR signal. It can't display HDR at all. The closest thing it can do would be content-adaptive fullscreen brightness changing.

braiamp 1y ago

There's someone that did the job to actually figuring out how to make the HDR of the switch work, but it needs your display to support certain features to be correct https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X84e14oe6gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X84e14oe6gs

MBCook 1y ago
That only helps some. I have a display that supports that feature but I still can’t get it to look right. It’s a little better than I had it set. But it’s still a problem. As this article shows, it just wasn’t designed right.

mortenjorck 1y ago

The most unpleasant effect from cut-rate HDR is when graphics with bright backgrounds get lazy-mapped to HDR. Perhaps the worst offender I've ever seen was the Mafia remake by Hangar 17, which loads every time with a sequence of studio logos with white backgrounds that cut from black. The RGB(255,255,255) backgrounds get stretched to maximum HDR nits, and the jump from RGB(0,0,0) (especially on an OLED) is absolutely eye-searing. I literally had to close my eyes whenever I'd load the game.

xnx 1y ago
Even worse when you're in a dark room. The white flash when loading many otherwise dark mode websites and apps is the worst.
- baobun 1y ago
  At least for Firefox, having the browser chrome set to dark (typically by having it picked up from GTK theme preferences) should make the default page background dark too. And I think userchrome.css to override default bgcolor should still work. Of course there are individual wonky sites which will still flash but if applicable, those two things should reduce the occurrences significantly.
theshackleford 1y ago
> (especially on an OLED) Why would it be any more impactful on OLED than any given FALD display capable of putting out >1000 nits sustained?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- noname120 1y ago
  Contrast ratio
  - theshackleford 1y ago

fxtentacle 1y ago

I believe the article is based on a wrong assumption. The author argues that everything could look more realistic and that VFX could pop more with stronger HDR, but in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to keep a stylized cartoon game also stylized in its brightness choices. When you drive towards the sun, what is more fun? A realistic HDR brightness that blinds you, or a „wrong“ brightness level that helps the background stay in the background without interrupting your flow? Similarly, should eye candy like little sparks grab your attention by being the brightest object on screen? I’d say no. The hardware can handle full HDR and more brightness, but one could argue that the game is more fun with incorrect brightness scaling…

MBCook 1y ago
That’s not the problem. The game should look like a normal Mario game at a minimum. It should use its additional color palette available in HDR to look better, and the additional brightness to make make effects pop as you describe. The problem is that’s not what it’s doing. Some things pop better, but it’s not because they’re using extra colors. It may be a little brightness, but mostly it’s that everything else just got toned down so it looks kinda washed out. If they did nothing but use the expanded color palette and did not use the additional brightness at all I would be a lot happier than with what we have right now. I haven’t turned it back to SDR mode but I’m legitimately considering it. Because I suspect the game looks better that way.
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  Mario Kart World generally looks more saturated than previous games if anything, so it definitely meets that minimum. And the article is about they missed out on the optionality of using the additional gamut, but that additional gamut wouldn't intrinsically look better. It's easy enough to edit a screenshot to show us what could have been, but even in that single screenshot there are things that look worse: like the flames gained saturation but lost the depth the smoke was adding, and some reasonable atmospheric haze vanished. (similarly the game in the side-by-side has some downright awful looking elements, like the over-saturated red crystals that punch a hole through my HDR display...) Given Nintendo's track record for stylization over raw image quality, I'm not sure why this isn't just as likely them intentionally prioritizing SDR quality and taking a modest-but-safe approach to HDR... especially when the built-in screen maxes out at 450 nits.

twoodfin 1y ago

The intrinsic research and analysis behind this article are great. I’m having a hard time, though, not tripping over the obvious (tell me I’m wrong!) ChatGPT “polish”. Multilevel tutorial outlines, bolded key points, “X is Y—not Z”, … I can’t articulate why it bothers me. Except maybe the implied assumption that the author’s real voice & style benefit more than they are harmed from being submerged in what is ultimately mathematically derived mush.

jlarcombe 1y ago
yes it's hard to understand why people feel the need to do this and I worry it's just going to become ubiquitous and ruin everything
isoprophlex 1y ago
I know why it bothers me. It's lazy. Just look at those telltale fucking bulleted lists. The same point, re-phrased slightly; the shit you thought was clever when you were 15 years old, bullshitting your way through a high school history exam. If you consider your writing bad enough to warrant a LLM fluffing pass, I consider it no better than the 99% of worse than mediocre, lazy, attention grabbing bullshit without real intellectual quality that pollutes the internet.
- kybernetyk 1y ago
  Yeah there’s also those people who aren’t native speakers. I tend to run ChatGPT over most stuff I write because while writing in English for over 30 years now I still can’t compare to a native speaker. Call it lazy but I think for the reader reading a rephrased LLM article is more enjoyable than trying to parse some borderline “Kauderwelsch”(German for gibberish) :)
  - 1123581321 1y ago
    I’m just one reader but I enjoy reading English from non-native speakers. There’s often a terse, wry or precise quality to it that native English writers won’t make the time for, since they can roll out so many idioms. Your translations are legitimate contributions to the English-language community.

numpad0 1y ago

> HDR is mainstream – From just a quick browsing of BestBuy, nearly all TVs over 42” are 4K and support HDR. 9th gen consoles are shipping with HDR on by default. The majority of your audience is HDR-equipped. "Mainstream" or "majority" in context of Nintendo is a $20-40k/yr white collar household with 2 kids. The REAL mainstream. Some would have real ashtrays on a dining table. ~None of them had bought any of TVs over 42" with 4K resolution and HDR support in past 10 years. Though, I do wonder how globally mainstream is such a household buying Nintendo hardware. Admittedly it could be somewhat of a local phenomenon.

thinkingtoilet 1y ago
I don't know how out of touch you have to be to think a family with two kids making $20k a year is affording a switch 2 on release.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- numpad0 1y ago
  Japanese average income is $32k, the JP special of Switch 2 is $350, Switch 1 sold 37m, and Japanese working age population under is ~74m(out of 120m). Either six-figure Nintendo gamers are hoarding boxes full of Switch 1 in the attic and completely destroying the statistics, or everyone at that income bracket is sophisticated enough to desire one. Frankly, this is why I'm wondering how normal it is globally, because I believe Japan is not supposed to be a village of broke Vulcans. Maybe the nerds are in fact hoarding tons of Switches.
  - thinkingtoilet 1y ago
    My bad. I didn't know you were talking about Japan. I assumed you were talking about America.
epcoa 1y ago
Not sure why you would associate “white collar” with poverty. While technically there are poor office workers, this is not the typical association.

jekwoooooe 1y ago

Nintendo cheaped out just so they can resell the same thing to the people obsessed with their branding Anything that isn’t an oled simply cannot do HDR. it’s just physically impossible to get the real contrast.

Rubberducky1324 1y ago
LCD screens with FALD (Full Array Local Dimming) can do HDR just fine. Usually they even have higher sustained brightness due to the inherent limitations of OLED.
- jekwoooooe 1y ago
  With huge halos sure. Go watch fireworks on an lcd with local dimming even if it has thousands of dimming zones you will see huge halos which ruin contrast

colechristensen 1y ago

It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, color was new and being done poorly. Now Oz is nostalgic so it gets a pass because of its uniqueness, but new films that look like that would be a little absurd. I like some of the choices on Mario Kart World with HDR, but a lot of it just needs to be toned down so the things which do blow out the colors are impressive but also fit instead of just everything being turned up to 11.

deleted 1y ago

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danbolt 1y ago

> You might look at the HDR representations of this game and think “Wait, the game appears more colorful” and this is because of the Hunt Effect. The Hunt Effect describes how we think a brighter color is more saturated, but in reality, it’s just an optical illusion. Sounds like an incredibly cost-effective optical illusion!

hombre_fatal 1y ago

HDR video/images in the macOS/iOS browser have to be one of the most confusing UX in recent memory. Why are people able to craft an image/video that bypasses my screen brightness and color shift settings? If I wanted to see the media in full fidelity, I wouldn't have my screen dimmed with nightshift turned on in my dark bedroom. It's not OP's fault. My mind is just blown every time I see this behavior.

gloxkiqcza 1y ago
I consider this to be a bug. I want to view HDR content with brightness differences scaled in a way that the maximum value barely, if at all, exceeds the set display brightness. The fact that it just goes full 1600 nits blast when you view a video from a sunny day is a terrible UX in most cases and it’s the reason why I have HDR turned off for video recording, even though I might miss it later. To make matters worse, it also applies to 3rd party views.
- eclipxe 1y ago
  I really enjoy it
eclipxe 1y ago
No I love this behavior. Makes the content really stand out and more enjoyable to view.
- rideontime 1y ago
  Then you are free to turn up your brightness.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  You might be saying that you'd prefer if all media were at full nits and color fidelity. But that's not what's being discussed here. The current implementation means that only the occasional image/video behaves that way, and only if it were crafted that way.
1y ago

rohansood15 1y ago

I have never owned a gaming console, and I was actually considering getting the Switch 2 as a casual gamer to play with friends/family. My first reaction when I saw the launch/gameplay video was why does this look so washed out? Now I kinda know why - thank you!

WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago

This is a game on a handheld You want low latency and long battery life, HDR has an impact on the two Have people forgotten what a handheld is supposed to be? portable device on a battery

whatevaa 1y ago
HDR doesn't impact processing much. Some games implement HDR toggles by rendering in HDR and using shaders to map to SDR when needed, apparently.
Firehawke 1y ago
Then why even have a HDR display as the handheld screen itself? Come ON.
- WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago
  it perhaps was less expensive to produce on a mass scale the game perhaps started development when they had a different screen planned for the console? according to rumors, the console is at least 1year late i'm just pointing out a fact, i'm not saying that everything they do make sense
  - simoncion 1y ago
    > it perhaps was less expensive to produce on a mass scale It might be true that an HDR-capable panel was cheaper than one that was only SDR-capable. That doesn't mean that Nintendo was obligated to incur the (probably very modest) increase in energy drain from additional processing load and (probably quite a bit less modest) increase in energy drain from making the screen far brighter on average than when running in SDR mode. They could have just run the panel in SDR mode and limited HDR mode to when one was running on AC power in a dock. Or even never enabled HDR mode at all. NOTE: I've not looked into whether or not enabling HDR in a given game has a significant effect on battery life. I'm also a big fan of manufacturers and game developers creating good HDR-capable hardware and publishing good HDR-capable software whenever they reasonably can. Higher contrast ratios and (-IMO- more importantly) wider color gamuts are just nice.

freetime2 1y ago

Fair point I suppose, but honestly I don't really care. The game looks plenty bright and colorful and Mario-y, and I certainly never stopped to notice banding in the sky or lack of detail in the clouds. There are about a thousand other things in any given game that matter more to me than HDR tone mapping, and I'm happy for developers to focus on those things. The one exception might be a game where you spend a lot of time in the dark - like Resident Evil or Luigi's mansion. Looking at his example video where he compares Godfall Ultimate footage to Mario Kart - I quite dislike the HDR in Godfall Ultimate. Certain elements like health bars, red crystals, and sparks are emphasized way too much, to the detraction of character and environment design. I find Mario Kart to be much more tasteful. That's not to say that Mario Kart World couldn't be better looking in HDR, but the author doesn't really do a compelling job showing how. In the side-by-side examples with "real" HDR, I prefer the game as-is.

throawayonthe 1y ago

[dead]

darkteflon 1y ago

Don’t disagree with the findings wrt MKW specifically, but PSA that, in general, HDR on the Switch 2 can be substantially improved by enabling HGIG tonemapping on TVs which support it, then going through the HDR calibration steps again. HDTVTest covered it here: https://youtu.be/X84e14oe6gs?si=bh1U7OHxGlzzJO8w https://youtu.be/X84e14oe6gs?si=bh1U7OHxGlzzJO8w

aranelsurion 1y ago

I personally find HDR as one of the most impactful recent display tech, but there are plenty of hoops to jump through before you get to that experience. You need a real HDR display (800 nits+), FALD or OLED for contrast, some calibration, and software that uses it well (really hit and miss at least on Windows). Once all the stars align, the experience is amazing. Doom Eternal has one of the best HDR implementations on PC, and I suggest trying it once on a good display before writing HDR off as a gimmick. There’s something about how taillights of a car in a dark street in Cyberpunk look, and that just can’t be replicated on an SDR display afaict. Then you have some games where it’s implemented terribly and it looks washed out and worse than SDR. Some people go through the pain and mod them to look right, or you just disable HDR with those. I’d vouch for proper HDR any day, that being said I wouldn’t expect it to improve Mario Kart much even with a proper implementation. The art style of the game itself is super bright for that cheery mood, and no consumer display will be able to show 1000nits with 99% of the frame at full brightness. It’ll likely look almost the same as SDR.

tokinonagare 1y ago
On the other hand I find it the lamest and most annoying "feature" of the last 10 years. The article itself is a good demonstration (at least on my M1 MBP): as soon as an image has a single pixels row displayed, the luminosity of the whole page fades, and the reverse happens when no image is in sight. The comparison video is the first time ever I see the tech doing anything else than changing the luminosity of the screen.
qingcharles 1y ago
This is the problem we have right now. Cheap nasty displays that put HDR on the box and are totally trash. Most people aren't buying $4000 Sony OLED TVs, they're buying the $300 SANGUULQ brand on Black Friday sale at Wal-mart. One reason for keeping Apple hardware around is a decent display test bench. I do the best I can with image work, but once it leaves your hands it's a total lottery.
cco 1y ago
HDR means my phone will blind me at night and my laptop screen will be super bright in some parts and dim on others. So far this is my experience of HDR.

ratmeadow 1y ago

Interesting article and it's great that it touches on colour science concepts. IMO "HDR" is one of the most commonly misunderstood and butchered graphics terms out there. A lot of people who probably should understand it (artists, photographers, designers, computer graphics engineers) don't understand it. Like the author mentions, the industry has been stuck in SDR world for historical reasons and probably because SDR is a fudge that looks good enough most of the time. Hence a proliferation of poor understanding and poor colour pipelines. Also, interestingly, even with decent colour science there is still an art to it, so you can do a lot of things which are half correct and it doesn't obviously look bad to most people. What surprised me is why a new game from a big studio, designed to support "HDR", would not be designed all in linear space to begin with. Because then doing tone mapping correctly for different display technologies becomes easy. However my knowledge is mostly from the photography world so perhaps someone with game knowledge can weigh in.

user____name 1y ago

Nintendo really seems to dislike dithering their intermediate buffers for some reason. Their first party titles often have quite visible banding artifacts. Dithering is easy and cheap and solves it completely. Here's some good examples: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MslGR8 https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MslGR8