HDR10+ PC gaming is coming

Samsung goes big on gaming

IF YOU’VE NEVER been to a television manufacturer briefing, consider yourself lucky. They spend hours trying to sell features you don’t need, running flattering demonstrations against rival panels, and bigging up those picture processing modes we all turn off as soon as we unbox the TV.

I recently went to an event hosted by Samsung, which began with some flogging of the 8K dead horse—8K displays account for just 0.15 percent of TV sales worldwide (see News, page 9). Thankfully, it soon moved on to something people do care about—gaming, and specifically PC gaming.

There was a demo of futuristic racer Redout using Samsung’s own HDR10+ standard, thanks to beta drivers provided by Nvidia.

Like Dolby Vision, HDR10+ allows content makers to add dynamic metadata to the picture and, as our colleagues at What Hi-Fi? found, this makes the resulting image punchier, deeper, and more dynamic.

Unlike Dolby Vision, HDR10+ is a royaltyfree open format created by Samsung, and while it sells more televisions worldwide than any other manufacturer, Panasonic and Philips have also adopted the format.