I personally find HDR as one of the most impactful recent display tech, but there are plenty of hoops to jump through before you get to that experience.
You need a real HDR display (800 nits+), FALD or OLED for contrast, some calibration, and software that uses it well (really hit and miss at least on Windows).
Once all the stars align, the experience is amazing. Doom Eternal has one of the best HDR implementations on PC, and I suggest trying it once on a good display before writing HDR off as a gimmick.
There’s something about how taillights of a car in a dark street in Cyberpunk look, and that just can’t be replicated on an SDR display afaict.
Then you have some games where it’s implemented terribly and it looks washed out and worse than SDR. Some people go through the pain and mod them to look right, or you just disable HDR with those.
I’d vouch for proper HDR any day, that being said I wouldn’t expect it to improve Mario Kart much even with a proper implementation. The art style of the game itself is super bright for that cheery mood, and no consumer display will be able to show 1000nits with 99% of the frame at full brightness. It’ll likely look almost the same as SDR.
On the other hand I find it the lamest and most annoying "feature" of the last 10 years. The article itself is a good demonstration (at least on my M1 MBP): as soon as an image has a single pixels row displayed, the luminosity of the whole page fades, and the reverse happens when no image is in sight. The comparison video is the first time ever I see the tech doing anything else than changing the luminosity of the screen.
This is the problem we have right now. Cheap nasty displays that put HDR on the box and are totally trash. Most people aren't buying $4000 Sony OLED TVs, they're buying the $300 SANGUULQ brand on Black Friday sale at Wal-mart.
One reason for keeping Apple hardware around is a decent display test bench. I do the best I can with image work, but once it leaves your hands it's a total lottery.
You need a real HDR display (800 nits+), FALD or OLED for contrast, some calibration, and software that uses it well (really hit and miss at least on Windows).
Once all the stars align, the experience is amazing. Doom Eternal has one of the best HDR implementations on PC, and I suggest trying it once on a good display before writing HDR off as a gimmick.
There’s something about how taillights of a car in a dark street in Cyberpunk look, and that just can’t be replicated on an SDR display afaict.
Then you have some games where it’s implemented terribly and it looks washed out and worse than SDR. Some people go through the pain and mod them to look right, or you just disable HDR with those.
I’d vouch for proper HDR any day, that being said I wouldn’t expect it to improve Mario Kart much even with a proper implementation. The art style of the game itself is super bright for that cheery mood, and no consumer display will be able to show 1000nits with 99% of the frame at full brightness. It’ll likely look almost the same as SDR.