Are you insane? What kind of eye searing display device do you have that you want the middle-gray target @ 1800 nits? 
Boosting middle-gray that high is just going to erase all shadow detail, and give you a headache.
And 1800 nits is nearly twice that. Why are you setting luminance so high? The new luminance HDR visualization vs either EDID MaxLocalY or EDID MaxAvgY should show most of your signal being clipped into oblivion.
The shadows were completely crushed, i kept pushing it till i could at least see some shadow detail. I’m doing more tests, VLC seems to be working okayish-ly, but it seems like the previous version managed superior HDR with VLC. As for N:A, idk what’s going on with that game because it seems convinced it’s running at 900p, and keeps scaling out of desktop space 
Trying to fix it
VLC needs a complete passthrough on this, there are a few other games that need that as well.
Basically, if software needed the ‘Unaltered’ colorspace for in/out in prior versions of SK, they are not eligible for the tonemapping pipeline being used here. There are not many games that require that, the only two programs that come to immediate mind are VLC and The Witness.
Yeah N:A is weirdly broken for me, without even enabling HDR. I’ve verified my settings are set to 4k in-game, but the game or SK keeps thinking it’s 900p - i’ve messed around with the different scaling options but nothing seems to do it. Can you send me your N:A config so i can try it?
As for me setting luminance, i know my eyes are fine since the video you uploaded recently looks the way it should.
Just make sure the engine is not trying to run in fullscreen exclusive mode and most of its resolution bugs won’t reach the HDR code in SK. Because SK now supports Fullscreen Flip, games don’t get forced down to Borderless Window mode just by enabling HDR anymore. NieR: Automata is incompatible with Fullscreen Exclusive, it needs a windowed mode force-override or bad stuff like this is going to happen.
Doesn’t fix it for me, i replicated your settings and even messed around with nvidia’s scaling settings from the control panel.
The game settings are definitely at 4k, so i’m confused XD
Works now, had to change the nvidia scaling settings to something different from what i tried 
It’s actually not.
The game stupidly creates a SwapChain during startup at 1600x900 resolution that it turns around and orphans and creates a second SwapChain a few seconds later.
DXGI FlipModel doesn’t support 2 SwapChain’s on a single window, so stuff gets weird very quickly in this game. Add to that the fact that you’ve forced a Latency Waitiable SwapChain on, and you’re going to need a resolution override to fix this problem.
N:A HDR works fine So i’m not sure what’s going on with Rise of the Tomb Raider. I’ll need to download other games to test more. I have 8tb of storage, but it’s mostly used up for work.
Rise has NVIDIA HDR doesn’t it, unsure if Shadows is the same or has Windows 10 HDR implemented.
EDIT: There’s that article.
EDIT: Think the (few?) games that use FreeSync2 HDR like Far Cry 5 give you a choice but for NVIDIA HDR this predates Win10 HDR support and err DXGI 1.5 D3D11 and D3D12 support I think and then DXGI 1.6 later on improving it further? I don’t remember the specifics too well here.
Would assume Mass Effect Andromeda with Dolby HDR also being a bit non-standard if you SpecialK HDR that but I’m not 100% on what overrides you’d need and what results you would get for these other modes of HDR on PC.
EDIT: That game also has both modes so it shouldn’t be a problem.
EDIT: Which is to say if HDR10’s a choice using that and the SpecialK overrides and HDR settings and widget should be fairly effective at configuring it as intended.
Whereas other implements particularly some earlier games before HDR10/Windows 10 HDR was a more standard choice could have some differences in how this works and what the results would be if attempted to calibrate / configure these modes through SpecialK.
Nothing surprising here and I don’t have the technical knowledge for how some of these modes are implemented but yeah I would imagine that’s a very possible source of some issues here.
Rise doesn’t have HDR, or at least the Steam version doesn’t. PCGW confirms, and there’s various forums out there wondering why it wasn’t brought to PC despite the blog you linked. Rise of the Tomb Raider - PCGamingWiki PCGW - bugs, fixes, crashes, mods, guides and improvements for every PC game
That’s interesting, for all the updates with D3D12 and the CPU/AMD optimizations that would have made perfect sense for Nixxes to implement all the features and parity between versions like Steam or UWP.
Curious. Tomb Raider 2013 had a console exclusive update / definitive edition type of thing but the patches and continued work on Rise even after the DLC were out I would have expected this to be supported as well during that process.
EDIT:
So weird, blog article and all and this isn’t like the Assassin’s Creed Unity NVIDIA tessellation where they backtracked and focused on patching the game leading to this feature ultimately getting cut after a few early preview images.
(Forgot what NVIDIA called their mode for this, also seen in Batman Arkham City and Origins though other than being branded a Game Works effect it’s standard D3D11 stuff here.)
N:A is working very nicely with Nvidia HDR recording 
So i guess there’s just something wrong with Rise.
SK HDR renders my texture pack basically pointless 
You have to choose between one or the other, and i’d say choose HDR.
So VLC should not be used with this version of SK…that’s a bummer
Capped to 60 FPS – 0 frame latency.
Uncapped, running at 71 FPS – 3 frames latency.
This does not compute for me… Is it that the game is bottlenecked on the GPU and so the CPU prepares the next three frames in advance (‘prerendered frames’) and that’s causing the render latency?
Wonder if sequential instead of discard has anything to do with it but I’ve read several reviews about Age of Empires 2 definitive criticism the performance of the game.
There’s probably some CPU overhead plus this is 3D instead of 2D along with not just AI calculations but also the whole physics system which I fondly remember for the destruction when you finally leveled the opponents main base.
(I also remember the AI cheating by a fair bit but I think they actually reworked that particular working-as-intended feature a bit in these re-releases of the series.)
Now they just need to cover Age of Mythology next.
I did finish Rise of the Tomb Raider in SK HDR. The input colorspace had to be set at “Unaltered” to make it look correct.
However the newest SK version doesn’t have that option anymore.
Btw @Kaldaien can you check the 32 bit file if its still 0.11.0.49 or 0.11.1.0 ?
Video SDR → HDR color processing calls for an entirely different set of tools, actually. If after I get this stuff really polished off, there’s still interest in doing this for non-interactive content (e.g. SDR movies), I’ll put some work in hernest.
The real thing preventing me from researching a video-based HDR processing pipeline is no conceivable way to get my work integrated with a YouTube player of some sort (endless content!). If someone figures that out for me, I’ll get serious about video processing
I believe VLC can handle YouTube links just fine.
There’s also SVP which, if I remember it correctly, also includes a YouTube companiom app that allows the use of its interpolation magic on YouTube videos, while playing it back (I believe) in their MPV based video player.
Basically, your GPU is at 100% workload and the CPU has prepared an additional 3 frames of commands because nobody told it to stop force-feeding the GPU more work to do. So until those queued frames get flushed, you’re stuck with 3 frames of unwanted latency here.
That’s what a framerate limiter actually does … imposes artificial throttling -before- the CPU → GPU work queue fills completely. There are a number of things SK can do to solve the problem, BTW. Turning SK’s limiter on in D3D11 disables render-queueing and drops late frames instead (or at least it does when the driver isn’t trying to outsmart me).
Fighting with NVIDIA’s latency optimizations in their driver is no fun at all. They just take a sledge hammer and start ignoring normal DXGI SwapChain config and the only sign that something’s up is behavior that violates every specification Microsoft has ever written
Vk / D3D12 developers are quite lucky, NVIDIA doesn’t screw around with the mechanics of those APIs. But most of SK is built for D3D11, so I’m fair game :-\
