In my limited experience, I understand the biggest hurdle to HDR implementation is the fact that the original artists didn’t specify HDR colour and luminance values when the games were originally made. We would have to rewind 15+ years to when the games were being developed just to know what the original vision of the designers was.
If you look at games released in the current generation, even games on Xbox One and PS4 Pro with patched 4K support don’t feature HDR. Doom and Titanfall 2 come to mind. To enable it, the developer would have to go back to square 1 in the art asset development pipeline, as well as the game engines themselves, and remake every relevant asset for the HDR spec. Every texture and special effect would have to be re-written.
The best that we could hope for if Dolphin supported HDR would be a tone-mapped implementation, which simply covnerts the original 100 nits presentation into a 5000 (or was it 10,000?) nits colour space, similar to the way that the TV series Planet Earth II combines true HDR source footage with footage taken from SDR GoPros, drones and cheaper cine-cameras. I do believe that there would be almost no benefit to users if this was a feature.
If you look at games released in the current generation, even games on Xbox One and PS4 Pro with patched 4K support don’t feature HDR. Doom and Titanfall 2 come to mind. To enable it, the developer would have to go back to square 1 in the art asset development pipeline, as well as the game engines themselves, and remake every relevant asset for the HDR spec. Every texture and special effect would have to be re-written.
The best that we could hope for if Dolphin supported HDR would be a tone-mapped implementation, which simply covnerts the original 100 nits presentation into a 5000 (or was it 10,000?) nits colour space, similar to the way that the TV series Planet Earth II combines true HDR source footage with footage taken from SDR GoPros, drones and cheaper cine-cameras. I do believe that there would be almost no benefit to users if this was a feature.