HDR10 Plus has had a rough time in the video industry. It was originally announced back in 2017 by Samsung and Amazon Video. HDR10+ (also known as HDR10 Plus) is an upgrade to the standard HDR10 and acts very similar to Dolby Vision. This means the metadata can accurately adjust brightness levels on your TV depending on the content. So the TV isn’t at one set brightness the whole time when watching TV shows and movies.
Sadly, the adoption rate for HDR10+ hasn’t been as great as Dolby Vision. While many brands and filmmakers have included HDR10+ workflows in production, most TVs opt for Dolby Vision instead of HDR10+. If anything, Samsung has pushed HDR10+ on its own for years while leaving Dolby Vision support off its TV range completely.
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The company now thinks HDR10+ gaming is the future and is acting as the pioneer for the tech. The company has announced the upcoming free-to-play shooter, The First Descendant will include HDR10+ support at launch.
Samsung doesn’t state which platforms the game will support HDR10+ on but it will likely only be on PC. Sony and Microsoft haven’t ever mentioned HDR10+ support on Xbox or PlayStation. PC, on the other hand, now supports the metadata through NVIDIA’s RTX 40-Series GPUs.
Of course, HDR10+ works just the same as Dolby Vision gaming. It will automatically calibrate your TV brightness and colours depending on the game’s scene. The game will feed the metadata to the display and tell it what to do. It is a neat feature.
You’ll also need to have a compatible HDR10+ display which is far and few between. Most Samsung TVs and monitors support HDR10+ but the tech is hard to find in other brands. This is strange given how HDR10+ is the “royalty-free” version of HDR whereas Dolby Vision comes with a heavy license fee for TV makers.
While The First Descendant getting HDR10+ is great news, there isn’t much hope for other games at this rate. With a limited platform rollout and one game to play, Samsung isn’t really showing a bright future for the tech.
To make matters worse, HDR10+ is the inferior product compared to Dolby Vision gaming due to its 10-bit colour depth compared to Dolby Vision’s 12-bit colour depth. All of this makes the HDR10+ announcement feel dated.
You’ll be able to test our HDR10 Plus on The First Descendant when it opens for beta on 19 September. Check out some gameplay from the title below.
Source: Samsung
