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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> Mario Kart World generally looks more saturated than previous games if anything, so it definitely meets that minimum.

Compare any of the retro tracks to their World counterpart, then say that again. The game’s general palette and design is so washed out and bland compared to the DS, Wii, 3DS, and Tour versions of those tracks.

I mean you included a title that launched on a frontlit TFT with 18-bit color and maybe 60% sRGB coverage, for example.

If there's a track that's actually less saturated than it was then, it's definitely not the result of an SDR-first workflow.

> 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.

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