Nvidia GPUs suffer ~%10 performance drop from HDR

Maneil99 · Jul 23, 2018

https://www.computerbase.de/2018-07/hdr-benchmarks-amd-radeon-nvidia-geforce/2/

German site did some benchmarks on a few of the big titles out there that actually support HDR. Surprisingly Nvidia GPUs drop anywhere from 5-10 FPS in games.

Rizific · Jul 23, 2018

howd you get banned in 5 minutes? anyway, performance drop for extra eye candy. isnt that kind of expected? or is that not how hdr works? genuinely asking.

Nostremitus · Jul 23, 2018

Rizific said:
howd you get banned in 5 minutes? anyway, performance drop for extra eye candy. isnt that kind of expected? or is that not how hdr works? genuinely asking.

Apparently it doesn't affect AMD GPUs the same way when enabling HDR.

Essentially think of HDR as the next step up from full RGB. You have an even wider color gamut (10bit) and higher contrast(steps between full black and bright white)

DocSeuss · Jul 23, 2018

It doesn't really surprise me that you'd lose performance for doing more shit, but it's weird that AMD doesn't.

Rizific said:
howd you get banned in 5 minutes? anyway, performance drop for extra eye candy. isnt that kind of expected? or is that not how hdr works? genuinely asking.

nvidia ninjas

alexbull_uk · Jul 23, 2018

Weird. I assumed that displaying HDR was essentially free.

RoboPlato · Jul 23, 2018

That's weird. Wonder why. Haven't heard any devs on the console side say there's a performance hit.

zombiejames · Jul 23, 2018

alexbull_uk said:
Weird. I assumed that displaying HDR was essentially free.

Back in the day there were performance impacts of going from 16-bit to 32-bit color. I'd imagine it would be similar here.

Deleted member 35011 · Jul 23, 2018

I always heard that HDR on PC didn't work properly - are there PC games right now that have good HDR? I finally got a good GPU a few days ago so I might want to give it a shot.

Deleted member 4970 · Jul 23, 2018

RoboPlato said:
That's weird. Wonder why. Haven't heard any devs on the console side say there's a performance hit.

There def can be. I believe Guerilla mentioned around an additional 1ms - 2ms being needed to process it under a 33ms budget for Horizon

ss_lemonade · Jul 23, 2018

Velord said:
I always heard that HDR on PC didn't work properly - are there PC games right now that have good HDR? I finally got a good GPU a few days ago so I might want to give it a shot.

It doesn't work properly because of some disconnect between the GPU vendor and microsoft. When you start changing settings for instance like color settings, things can suddenly start breaking. Not exactly as straightforward as how consoles do it. The good thing is the latest Windows updates have made it a bit more fool proof but there were still issues the last time I tried using HDR.

Other than that, games with HDR support work and look just fine for me. Can't say I've noticed any performance penalty, but I also have a 1080 ti.

BriGuy · Jul 23, 2018

HDR isn't worth the headache on PC at the moment. I tried enabling it for Resident Evil 7 and it went beyond black crush (you can call it black crush 2) making the game unplayable. And then when I exited back to Windows, all the colors were really fucked up. Whites were dim grey, and everything else was super dull and brownish yellow, like a PS360 game from 2007.

nogoodnamesleft · Jul 23, 2018

BriGuy said:
HDR isn't worth the headache on PC at the moment. I tried enabling it for Resident Evil 7 and it went beyond black crush (you can call it black crush 2) making the game unplayable. And then when I exited back to Windows, all the colors were really fucked up. Whites were dim grey, and everything else was super dull and brownish yellow, like a PS360 game from 2007.

None of this has happened to me since the option to enable HDR in windows 10 system settings has been introduced.

PopsMaellard · Jul 23, 2018

BriGuy said:
HDR isn't worth the headache on PC at the moment. I tried enabling it for Resident Evil 7 and it went beyond black crush (you can call it black crush 2) making the game unplayable. And then when I exited back to Windows, all the colors were really fucked up. Whites were dim grey, and everything else was super dull and brownish yellow, like a PS360 game from 2007.

That's a huge bummer as it's genuinely the biggest IQ enhancement since the jump to HD.

Hawk269 · Jul 23, 2018

I don't remember where I read it, but I do remember reading something that MS clocked the GPU of the Xbox One S slightly higher to give the headroom to do HDR. The standard Xbox One does not do HDR.

qa_engineer · Jul 23, 2018

Velord said:
I always heard that HDR on PC didn't work properly - are there PC games right now that have good HDR? I finally got a good GPU a few days ago so I might want to give it a shot.

It works for the most part. However it's not intuitive.Some games automatically detect an hdr display and will enable hdr on load, while others require that hdr and wcg be enabled within windows display settings.

Destiny 2 is the best example from an implementation standpoint imo. You don't need to enable hdr and wcg within windows display settings, just enable in game and the game/driver will automatically switch to hdr10. Also helps that it looks really good. Haven't noticed performance drops in that game specifically since the 1080ti can run it in 4k, hdr, at 60fps. However, not entirely surprised there was some performance hit happening that no one was aware of.

Edit: bf1 also has excellent implementation. Just enable in game and enjoy, no need to fuss or enable hdr and wcg full time within display settings.

DJ Lushious · Jul 23, 2018

zombiejames said:
Back in the day there were performance impacts of going from 16-bit to 32-bit color. I'd imagine it would be similar here.

HDR is not analogous to doubling in color depth. HDR has been utilized in games for over a decade, now it's all tone-mapping the video output to match. Wide-color gamut is its own technology and independent of HDR, though they are often lumped together.

Opera doesn't auto-translate websites (without an add-on) and I don't speak German, but do any of the titles referenced use Dolby Vision as their HDR video output? 5-10 frames per second is a pretty big hit, in my opinion, and I can't make sense of why these are the results.

Henrar · Jul 25, 2018

DJ Lushious said:
Opera doesn't auto-translate websites (without an add-on) and I don't speak German, but do any of the titles referenced use Dolby Vision as their HDR video output? 5-10 frames per second is a pretty big hit, in my opinion, and I can't make sense of why these are the results.

I don't think there is any game with DV support, only HDR10.

Linus815 · Jul 25, 2018

alexbull_uk said:
Weird. I assumed that displaying HDR was essentially free.

Nope, that's why MS increased the clockspeeds on the Xbox one S gpu compared to the OG.

Scently · Jul 25, 2018

Henrar said:
I don't think there is any game with DV support, only HDR10.

Mass Effect: Andromeda does.

inspectah · Jul 25, 2018

The strange part is the perf-loss in comparison to AMD:

Apal_ytos · Jul 25, 2018

Linus815 said:
Nope, that's why MS increased the clockspeeds on the Xbox one S gpu compared to the OG.

Yet regular PS4 got the HDR upgrade without any changes.
Maybe it had the headroom , while regular Xbox didn't ?

Lagspike_exe · Jul 25, 2018

inspectah said:
The strange part is the perf-loss in comparison to AMD:

Vega finally beating Pascal.

impingu1984 · Jul 25, 2018

Well I guess my colour blindness is a win here as HDR seems exactly the same to me as SDR.

That's a bandwagon I don't need to jump on with my next monitor, should save me some money lol.

dragn · Jul 25, 2018

impingu1984 said:
Well I guess my colour blindness is a win here as HDR seems exactly the same to me as SDR.

That's a bandwagon I don't need to jump on with my next monitor, should save me some money lol.

for me the bightness is more of a difference, you need a 1000+nit tv tho

Kyoufu · Jul 25, 2018

impingu1984 said:
Well I guess my colour blindness is a win here as HDR seems exactly the same to me as SDR.

That's a bandwagon I don't need to jump on with my next monitor, should save me some money lol.

It's not about seeing different colours, it's about seeing details from the brighter highlights.

SuperSplit · Jul 25, 2018

Well not like I'll know anytime soon, shelled out for Samsung CFG73, got one of the good ones too, Red n Greens are fantastic, I'll jump on a 4k 144hz HDR when it's within the €350ish range, gonna be awhile.
Hopefully then performance issues will be ironed out.

JahIthBer · Jul 25, 2018

it's because of the bandwidth compression tech Nvidia use i believe, HDR makes that useless, it has nothing to do with HDR on PC itself.
I wonder if Nvidia will fix it for their next gen cards is the better question.

Deleted member 11018 · Jul 25, 2018

Lagspike_exe said:
Vega finally beating Pascal.

really ?

D65 · Jul 25, 2018

BriGuy said:
HDR isn't worth the headache on PC at the moment. I tried enabling it for Resident Evil 7 and it went beyond black crush (you can call it black crush 2) making the game unplayable. And then when I exited back to Windows, all the colors were really fucked up. Whites were dim grey, and everything else was super dull and brownish yellow, like a PS360 game from 2007.

There's a reason for all of these things. Nevermind though.

ThereAreFourNaan · Jul 25, 2018

alexbull_uk said:
Weird. I assumed that displaying HDR was essentially free.

It should be, since games internally calculate at far higher precision than 10 bit even for conventional SDR games. Considering how fucked windows support has been for HDR (especially on Nvidia cards) it's extremely likely that this is a software issue, not a hardware issue. Even AMD cards should be closer to 0%, not 2% in terms of performance impact.

Smash-It Stan · Jul 25, 2018

i have no idea how you even enable 4k HDR on PC with 60hz. Is it DVI only??

ThereAreFourNaan · Jul 25, 2018

From the Guru3D article covering this:

Update, thanks Nizzen for the hint. The performance loss is likely due to the way NVIDIA converts RGB to reduced chroma YCbCr 4:2:2 in HDR (we discussed that previously here) which was used for HDR testing. If they used 4:4:4 or RGB, the performance would be the same as SDR. Considering GSYNC Ultra HD monitors bog down to 4:2:2, this looks the be the most plausible explanation.

ThereAreFourNaan · Jul 25, 2018

Smash-It Stan said:
i have no idea how you even enable 4k HDR on PC with 60hz. Is it DVI only??

Displayport for monitors that support it, HDMI works with TVs. The trick is you have to reduce colour bit depth because 4:4:4 60hs 4k HDR is not possible. You can do it without HDR, but you need to switch to 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 in order to get it to work with HDR. Not a problem for games (generally), but does cause a problem for reading text on a PC monitor.

Deleted member 17491 · Jul 25, 2018

ThereAreFourNaan said:
Displayport for monitors that support it, HDMI works with TVs. The trick is you have to reduce colour bit depth because 4:4:4 60hs 4k HDR is not possible. You can do it without HDR, but you need to switch to 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 in order to get it to work with HDR. Not a problem for games (generally), but does cause a problem for reading text on a PC monitor.

Chroma subsampling doesn't reduce colour depth. It adds colour compression based in the level used.

impingu1984 · Jul 25, 2018

Kyoufu said:
It's not about seeing different colours, it's about seeing details from the brighter highlights.

Colour blindness isn't just about seeing different colours, I mistake different hues of colours, HDR is a wider colour range (Due to more brightness and deeper blacks) so more hues.

The issue is in certain colour spaces I see just one colour whereas you would a full range of the spectrum. For example pale pinks like Will just look grey to me, A whole range of Pale reds and Pale orange will just look Brown to me.

The detail of colour is the range of hues in the spectrum, and that is exactly what I mistake for certain other colours or just don't see at all.

As a Deuteranope I confuse very commonly
1. Mid-reds with mid-greens
2. Blue-greens with grey and mid-pinks
3. Bright greens with yellows
4. Pale pinks with light grey
5. Mid-reds with mid-brown
6. Light blues with lilac

Believe me I've looked at HDR content on HDR vs SDR and the difference to me is extremely minimal, I can tell it's different but it's not that mindblowing at all where as people looking at the same can tell a very big difference.

ThereAreFourNaan · Jul 25, 2018

Caayn said:
Chroma subsampling doesn't reduce colour depth. It adds colour compression based in the level used.

Yes you're correct, I misspoke. Naturally you wouldn't want to reduce bit depth just to increase bit depth!

Powerofthecloud · Jul 25, 2018

impingu1984 said:
Colour blindness isn't just about seeing different colours, I mistake different hues of colours, HDR is a wider colour range (Due to more brightness and deeper blacks) so more hues.

The issue is in certain colour spaces I see just one colour whereas you would a full range of the spectrum. For example pale pinks like Will just look grey to me, A whole range of Pale reds and Pale orange will just look Brown to me.

The detail of colour is the range of hues in the spectrum, and that is exactly what I mistake for certain other colours or just don't see at all.

As a Deuteranope I confuse very commonly
1. Mid-reds with mid-greens
2. Blue-greens with grey and mid-pinks
3. Bright greens with yellows
4. Pale pinks with light grey
5. Mid-reds with mid-brown
6. Light blues with lilac

Believe me I've looked at HDR content on HDR vs SDR and the difference to me is extremely minimal, I can tell it's different but it's not that mindblowing at all where as people looking at the same can tell a very big difference.

That's really strange you should still be seeing deeper hues and bigger gradents in the spectrum from really bright to dark. I am a Deuteranope as well though that doesn't mean much as no one's cones are the same.

Maybe it was the content or the setup or something.

galv · Jul 25, 2018

BriGuy said:
HDR isn't worth the headache on PC at the moment. I tried enabling it for Resident Evil 7 and it went beyond black crush (you can call it black crush 2) making the game unplayable. And then when I exited back to Windows, all the colors were really fucked up. Whites were dim grey, and everything else was super dull and brownish yellow, like a PS360 game from 2007.

Zero issues once Windows 10 added the WCG/HDR option in Display Settings.

Resident Evil 7, Assassin's Creed Origins, Hitman, Battlefield 1, Destiny 2, Mass Effect: Andromeda all behaved perfectly with both of my TVs.

The only thing on my Samsung TV was that the Samsung TV keeps switching the Source type to "PC" - this fucks with HDR for some reason, I assume it's because it's trying to force 4:4:4 even though the incoming signal is 4K 10Bit HDR at 60Hz. Changing the Source type to anything else custom switches it back and it works just fine. This was the only time I saw blacks being absolutely destroyed and whites overblown as though there was a HDR signal but the HDR on the TV wasn't even on and the opposite, where the contrast was horrid and the brightest whites were appearing as grey.

Kuro · Jul 25, 2018

Nvidia can't even bother to add dithering for 8 bit monitors resulting in banding if your monitor doesn't have good gamma control. I doubt they'll fix this issue for a while.

DJ Lushious · Jul 25, 2018

Henrar said:
I don't think there is any game with DV support, only HDR10.

Scently said:
Mass Effect: Andromeda does.

Battlefield 1, too. Those are the only 2 I am aware of, though.

MazeHaze · Jul 25, 2018

Smash-It Stan said:
i have no idea how you even enable 4k HDR on PC with 60hz. Is it DVI only??

Nope. Works via hdmi for me.

Serious Sam · Jul 25, 2018

Lagspike_exe said:
Vega finally beating Pascal.

Does it really though? Maybe in this particular scenario with HDR, which could might as well be driver problem. But if we pick some of recently released PC games Nvidia still has a big lead, especially the 1080Ti. Nothing has changed.

Also keep in mind that Vega 64 for the most part of its life cost as much as 1080Ti !!!

impingu1984 · Jul 25, 2018

Powerofthecloud said:
That's really strange you should still be seeing deeper hues and bigger gradents in the spectrum from really bright to dark. I am a Deuteranope as well though that doesn't mean much as no one's cones are the same.

Maybe it was the content or the setup or something.

I dunno... I know others with Colour blindness who can see the difference with HDR. For me I just can't see it. My colour blindness is on the more extreme end, but apart from not allowing me to do certain jobs it's never really affected me much as you will know, you don't know any different.

I do wish some games / tech companies would actual get a handle on colour blindness tho. The "Filters" in the NVIDIA drivers are pretty useless much like Doom 2016 and the likes colour blind mode that applies some piss like filter for the whole screen which I know is different, instead doing things making important UI elements not clash is the way to go. Whole screen filters is NOT a colour blind mode, well not a good one anyway.

It's actually just better to allow us to just pick colours for UI elements etc rather than presets. No need for "Modes" just full UI customisations with regards colour is god tier for colour blindness.

But that is a whole other topic honestly.

MazeHaze · Jul 25, 2018

impingu1984 said:
Well I guess my colour blindness is a win here as HDR seems exactly the same to me as SDR.

That's a bandwagon I don't need to jump on with my next monitor, should save me some money lol.

What TV do you have? Lots of TVs that claim to be HDR can accept the signal and display an image, but don't have anywher close to the needed brightness and contrast to display HDR properly. There's a huge difference between say, a Sony 850d and an LG OLED or Sony 900e

impingu1984 · Jul 25, 2018

MazeHaze said:
What TV do you have? Lots of TVs that claim to be HDR can accept the signal and display an image, but don't have anywher close to the needed brightness and contrast to display HDR properly. There's a huge difference between say, a Sony 850d and an LG OLED or Sony 900e

I don't have one, I haven't bought one cos I cannot tell the difference. Looked at multiple displays in showrooms LCD, QLED, Quantum Dot, OLED, even spent a good few hours trying to tell the difference between SDR and HDR on my friends Sony A1 OLED which is 1000 nits.

It is absolutely not worth me investing in. I will get a HDR TV at some point because I believe it's likely ALL TVs will be HDR at some point. But I'm not going out of my way to buy one where I just cannot see a difference.

MazeHaze · Jul 25, 2018

impingu1984 said:
I don't have one, I haven't bought one cos I cannot tell the difference. Looked at multiple displays in showrooms LCD, QLED, Quantum Dot, OLED, even spent a good few hours trying to tell the difference between SDR and HDR on my friends Sony A1 OLED which is 1000 nits.

It is absolutely not worth me investing in. I will get a HDR TV at some point because I believe it's likely ALL TVs will be HDR at some point. But I'm not going out of my way to buy one where I just cannot see a difference.

Man that's a bummer. I've owned a few HDR TVs over the past couple years, and it still blows me away all the time.

impingu1984 · Jul 25, 2018

MazeHaze said:
Man that's a bummer. I've owned a few HDR TVs over the past couple years, and it still blows me away all the time.

It's not really a bummer to me as I've no basis of what I'm missing out on.

It's a money saver really :)

elzeus · Jul 25, 2018

The marketing people at AMD have really dropped the ball by not making a fine wine club.

HyGogg · Jul 25, 2018

RoboPlato said:
That's weird. Wonder why. Haven't heard any devs on the console side say there's a performance hit.

Higher bit depth means the need for greater precision in calculation. We used to see games offer 16-bit rendering (instead of 24/32) for performance gains.

These days I imagine most of the people invested in HDR on PC probably have the performance overhead to spare, but it is interesting that AMD is doing it better. I imagine some of this on the driver side.

Kage Maru · Jul 25, 2018

Linus815 said:
Nope, that's why MS increased the clockspeeds on the Xbox one S gpu compared to the OG.

I know this was mentioned by someone at MS but I don't think it was by any programmer or engineer. I think there may be a slight bandwidth cost but I'm not sure there would be a computational cost.

ThereAreFourNaan said:
From the Guru3D article covering this:

This is interesting. Wonder why Nvidia do it this way.

Nvidia GPUs suffer ~%10 performance drop from HDR

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