1w ago

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is as dark as that infamous Game of Thrones episode

www.polygon.com

19 comments

My guess (and this is a complete guess) is that they (Ubisoft) just assumed everyone has OLED TVs/Monitors.
Also, you'd want to re adjust the white balance level, or gamma levels/curve, probably not just the brightness.

You'l want to adjust, brightness, contrast and gamma of your screen.

"Even playing in HDR..."
Maybe that's part of the problem? HDR implementation on my Samsung sets is garbage, I have to disable it to watch anything. Too bad too, because the picture is gorgeous without it.
HDR On:
HDR Off:
- That's so weird, HDR is supposed to do the exact opposite of this.
  The again, Samsung... Don't buy Samsung anymore, it's been a trash brand for a long time now
  
  Yup, yup. Highly rated when I bought them, but in actual usage? Not so much.
- I turn off HDR whenever I can. I think it looks bad
  
  It’s one of those things where it looks good when in like the case of a video game, the GAME’s implementation of it is good AND your Console/PCs implementation is good AND your TV/Monitor’s implementation is good. But like unless you’ve got semi-deep pockets, at least one of those probably isn’t good, and so the whole thing is a wash.
- Wow, the whole room becomes brighter with HDR off /s
  
  I've been told HDR is not for bright rooms, you have to make everything dark...
  Yeah...
- I got a samsung monitor last year too (it was the cheapest hdr option and I keep seeing reddit praise them) and it has such a terrible hdr experience. When hdr is on either dark colors are light grayish, brights are too dark, darks are crushed, everything's too bright or colors are over saturated. I've tried every combination of adjusting brightness / gamma from the screen and/or from kde but couldn't figure out a simple way to easily turn down the brightness at night without some sort of image issue popping up. So recently I gave up and turned hdr off. Still can't use the kde brightness slider without fucking up the image but at least the monitor's brightness slider works now.
  Also if there are very few bright areas on the screen it further decreases its overall screen brightness, which also affects color saturation bcz of course.
  Also also just discovered freesync and vrr are two different toggles in two different menus for some fucking reason and if you only enable freesync like I did you get a flickering screen
  I really wish there was a 'no smart image fuckery' toggle in the settings.
  
  I didn’t really understand the benefit of HDR until I got a monitor that actually supports it.
  And I don’t mean simply can process the 10-bit color values, I mean has a peak brightness of at least 1000 nits.
  That’s how they trick you. They make cheap monitors that can process the HDR signal and so have an “HDR” mode, and your computer will output an HDR signal, but at best it’s not really different from the non-HDR mode because the monitor can’t physically produce a high dynamic range image.
  If you actually want to see an HDR difference, you need to get something like a 1000-nit OLED monitor (note that “LED” often just refers to an LCD monitor with an LED backlight). Something like one of these: https://www.displayninja.com/best-oled-monitor/
  These aren’t cheap. I don’t think I’ve seen one for less than maybe $700. That’s how much it costs unfortunately. I wouldn’t trust a monitor that claims to be HDR for $300.
  When you display an HDR signal on a non-HDR display, there are basically two ways to go about it: either you scale the peak brightness to fit within the display’s capabilities (resulting in a dark image like in OP’s example), or you let the peak brightness max out at the screen’s maximum (kinda “more correct” but may result in parts of the image looking “washed out”).
- Smart TV having absolutely horrible default settings and filters that ruin any viewing experience has little to do with HDR because the TV isn‘t even processing HDR images most of the time. That stuff is already mixed and there‘s not much any device can do to give you details in the darks and brights back. It‘s a much different story when you‘re actually processing real color information like in a video game. HDR should absolutely help you see in the dark here.
  
  I WISH it was the default settings. I went through every calibration and firmware update I could find. Even the model specific calibrations on rtings.com. Nothing made a difference.
  It appears to just be a flaw in Samsung's implementation. After going through all the Samsung forum information, the only suggestion that's guaranteed to work is "turn it off".
  Set #1:
  https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/ks8000
  Calibration:
  https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/ks8000/settings
  Set #2:
  https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/q800t-8k-qled
  https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/q800t-8k-qled/settings