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.

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.

Every game I first start requires a trip to turn off music, in-game VoIP, HDR, bloom, lensflare, screenshake if possible.

It's like a keyword bingo for usually poor implementations. I grant that maybe the implementation is good for any specific game you care to mention - but history has shaped my habits.

Don’t forget motion blur!

Motion blur is my only instant disable. I paid a lot of money and self-justification for this expensive GPU, and you want to make things look a blurry mess?

Motion blur can look fantastic / realistic. But almost never does. Especially when it's temporal.

I had forgotten it for my comment, but not when I see it in the graphics options! Yes, that is an absolute off switch every time.

You automatically turn off music?

The presence of in-game music is a poor implementation indicator?

I am a big proponent of "there's no wrong way to enjoy a game" but wow. In nearly 50 years of gaming that's a new one for me. Congratulations. But do whatever works for you... and I mean that sincerely, not sarcastically or dismissively.

I can’t believe that in 50 years, you’ve been unable to imagine people disabling music. I turn it off in games like Minecraft because it serves no purpose, and my husband routinely disables it in Factorio. Then you’ve got people with hearing difficulties I would rather hear the sound effects as they help gameplay.

Truly, in 50 years, none of this has occurred to you or you’ve never witnessed it in friends or family? That seems hyperbolic

That's not what JohnBooty was responding to, though. Turning off game music because it's not doing much for you or because you have other things you'd rather listen to is not at all unusual. Listing game music alongside poorly implemented features that get turned off by default before you even start playing the game is, yes!

I don't think it's unusual at all, depending on what genre of games they play. For example, they may be thinking of the likes of many PC strategy games where the music seems to just come in seemingly at random and distract, or completely ruin the ambience that the game world is trying to set.

I have a long rant responding to JohnBooty but ... what is it that game music is meant to do for me most of the time?

I understand that it helps some people get "into the flow" or something. But I don't have an issue with that. I occupy my mind trying to grasp the mechanics and be good at using them to play. If the gameplay doesn't have enough then papering over it with music doesn't do it for me.

And I'm not always looking for "intense" stuff. I like to chill out too. But I've played quite a few games over the years and so the gameplay has to have something to keep me entertained.

I enjoy music with Rocket League because I don't play competitive and so some music playing while I'm hanging out with others on my couch shooting-the-shit as it were is fine. It more of a "social setting music" than "game music".

After all these years, I don't miss it at all.

    That seems hyperbolic

I think maybe you skimmed instead of reading. I'm referring to the parent poster's practice of turning music off ASAP on first boot as standard operating practice, because they find it to be part of what they consider "keyword bingo for usually poor implementations" Here's what they said:

    Every game I first start requires a trip to turn off music, 
    in-game VoIP, HDR, bloom, lensflare, screenshake if possible.
    It's like a keyword bingo for usually poor implementations

But as you suspected: yes! I can imagine turning off game music, in general. Thank you for believing in me!

I have turned the music off in many games.

The mere presence of any of these things is not an indicator of overall game implementation clearly. I mean, trying to avoid the mere presence of these options would severely limit game choice.

But any one of these aspects can individually be crap and often are.

If I have a need for ingame VoIP I'll turn it back on. But I don't want to default to hearing randoms on the internet espousing bullshit using mic-always-on.

If it turns out the game is good with music, I'll turn it on. Rocket League works.

If one of my friends is raving about the graphics, I'll turn HDR or bloom on - though I haven't ever agreed with them enough to leave it that way.

So by default, yes I turn those things down or off before I even start playing.

Further detail for music. Often poorly implemented: repetitive, sounds similar to game sound effects, changes and gets louder when there's a rush horde. All distracting and ruining immersion.

I quit playing Day of Defeat because of the end of round music that I couldn't do anything about. I either couldn't hear footsteps next to me (part of the gameplay) or I was deafened with the end of round blaring. I don't have time to put up with poor UX when there are plenty of other games to play.

As I get older and find it harder to discern different sounds it is just easier to focus on what I want - the game and gameplay. It's the same thing as drivers turning down the stereo when they want to pay attention to finding a park or driveway - it's a distraction to what I'm here for.

I like music, and like to listen to it, either as a dedicated thing to do or while doing house chores or cruising long distances in the car. But generally not while gaming.

Thankfully so far, these are still options I can set to taste. I guess when the "the way it's meant to be played" crowd takes over I'll do something else with my time.

I also often have to turn of music because for some weird reason a lot of games have stopped providing a slider for music volume and replaced it with a checkbox. Game music is often too loud for my taste, I like it to remain in the background of the mix.

I agree on the HDR blinding you, its mostly just a gimmick. Where it works is in for example Diablo 4 when there is something really shiny lying on the ground, which makes it pop out.

Other games like Senua did actually manage to pull off an amazing sun/scene though. Because its slower they can use it to accentuate, for example you walk around a corner and go from the darkness into full on sunlight which is blinding, but then falls off so as to become bearable.

HDR is a scam. u can do exactly the same with SDR. its just a different format to express things.

the monitor can display what it can display. format of transfer doesn't change hardware capabilities, just how you express what u want towards them

SDR literally has fewer brightness bits. You can tonemap with the darkest in a scene pulled to zero and the brightest to 1, but, this is not usually what the color grader intended so usually isn’t done automatically. And when you do this, you end up with gaps in the middle (like 18-bit color). So usually, a range “in the middle” is reserved for SDR, and the extra two (or four, or six) bits of brightness in HDR allow you to pull it darker or brighter.

thanks for your insights. my comment was overly cynical. in practice though visually , on a good (really good) monitor, you really can not see a difference. trained eyes, cannot really see a real difference. the difference becomes visible more due to a monitors own quircks not displaying accurately (mapping of this sdr/hdr to colourspace).

this was posted before here on HN and i dont think its wrong. though ofcourse, technically, there are differences, which might be in some applicaitons ( but usually are not) exploited to the viewers benefit. (?? maybe?? someone with real good eyes :)) https://yedlin.net/DebunkingHDR/index.html

maybe my interpretation is wrong, but i dont think it is far off if it is. specification differences and differences in human perception are not the same thing

Would you say 8 bit audio can express the same audio quality as 16 bit audio?

It is weird, though, that they're different modes and you have to choose on both the device and the software which to use.

Imagine if every individual song, speaker/earbud, and MP3 player had a different implementation of 8/16 bit music, and it was up to you to compare/contrast the 8 variations to decide if 8 or 16 bits was more auditorially satisfying.

You get this with like levels and mixers, but not with such a fundamental quality as definition. Sure, you can chase hi-fi, but I feel like music has less artificial upscaling and usually hi-fi is a different product, not a toggle buried in various menus.

I don't know, it's kind of crazy.

It’s the transport. Imagine if the D/A was in the speaker; you might set params differently then.

We kind of did have an equivalent situation back in the day - you used to have A-law vs μ-law

Super Audio CD used 1 bit audio (at a very high sample rate) and sounded just fine

32 bit audio is higher resolution, it can have effects applied to it in higher detail. like subpixel coordinates might more clearly specify a pixels colours...

anything beyond 16bit (which is streamed to your speakers) is not audible though in the sense of playing it to the speaker. it matters in processing (dsp). (44 or 48khz inguess?)

Not to detract from your point, but ironically if they created the design with a more "HDR" (i.e. physically based) colour pipeline, it would probably be easier to tune the brightness of the sun correctly...