> 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. It could,

> 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. It could, but that's different than shouldn't. There could be good reasons for it, such as not wanting the primary gameplay to lie outside a color palette available to people playing on their TV in sRGB or in the common complete shit HDR modes that lie about their capabilities. It would be neat if more was used, but nothing about being HDR means that you should, or that it's even a good idea, to rely on the maximum capabilities. > I haven’t turned it back to SDR mode but I’m legitimately considering it. Because I suspect the game looks better that way. To be honest, without a TV with proper HDR, SDR mode will often look much better. The problem is that TVs are often quite awful when it comes to color volume, specular lighting and calibration. The SDR mode is often very untrue to the content, but stretches things within the TV capabilities to make it bright and vivid to look nice. The HDR mode on the other hand has to give up the charade, and in particular SDR tonemapped content, which if the TV didn't lie would have looked identical to SDR mode, looks really awful. A favorite of mine is to switch Apple TV's between SDR and (tone-mapped) HDR mode and see how different the main menu and YouTube app looks. I have yet to find a TV where UI doesn't look muted and bland in HDR.