HIGH DYNAMIC GAMES

A RECENT ARTICLE I wrote for Sound & Vision on High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology (“HDR Explained,” April/May, and also on soundandvision.com) focused on what HDR is and how it gets implemented in different types of displays. The focus of that article was movies on Ultra HD Blu-ray disc and on streaming services, but another topic worth discussing—one that regularly gets overlooked—is HDR gaming. HDR has actually been a factor in gaming for over a decade now, but has mostly consisted of HDR emulation, which involves taking a standard dynamic range game and exaggerating its visual aspects to create an HDR-like image. (I remember reading about HDR emulation way back when one of the Halo games launched for the Xbox 360 console.) But now that true 4K/HDR support has arrived for a variety of consoles and games, I thought I’d grab a controller and report on the experience.

While high-resolution graphics have always been a staple of PC gaming, it’s only recently that we witnessed the leap to 4K/HDR on game consoles. The first HDRcompatible console was the Xbox One S, though that model did not support 4K resolution and HDR was