Feature Request: HDR support!

[MayImilae]

AnyOldName3 Wrote:The subset of an HDR gamut which corresponds to SRGB's gamut has more colours

Do you have a source for that? Because from my understanding, that's not how it works... HDR doesn't have more detail because it's samples are tighter, it has more detail because it has more samples in all directions.

What the GameCube does is very unusual, since the 18-bit and 24-bit modes have the same color space despite the difference in bits. The console is "compressing" (it's really tonemapping but whatever) the GameCube's native 24-bit RGB output mode down to 18-bit, so each "step" (sample) of color is larger than it should be when converted back to 24-bit by the panel. This of course results in banding. This is super weird, and a pretty hacky way to work around the hardware limitations. But thanks to how it works, forcing a game to render in 24-bit mode is pretty easy, removing banding without expanding beyond the color space. Unless a game decided to optimize specifically for 18-bit in their textures in which case it can actually make things worse but you know!

On the other hand, Rec 709 (regular HD) and Rec 2020/2100 (modern HDR) have "steps" of the same size, just HDR is able to go further in either direction. If you tried to take advantage of the additional steps that HDR has over SDR, you'd have to go outside of SDR's color space, and the saturation and brightness would be all wrong, and it would break in ways unique to each game.

EDIT: Also I forgot to mention specifically that the GameCube has a 24-bit output support and lots of games support it by default. Though some games output in 18-bit due to hardware limitations for whatever the game is specifically wanting to do. The fact that the GameCube has 24-bit mode built in is a large part of why it is so simple to force all games to use it.