Have you recently booted up Roblox on your Xbox Series console and were blown away by just how deep the red blocks looked? Well your wish to get the best color experience on PC is coming to a Windows 10 PC near you—Auto HDR is now in preview, and will work with a thousand-plus DirectX 11 and 12 games. This means that you will be able to get an enhanced picture out of a number of games dating all the way back to the early days of 2011. Though I best leave the explanation of what Auto HDR is and what it does to the experts:
HDR is a video/imaging technique where the lights and darks in a digitally reproduced scene can be shown with more detail than before. In video games, the increased range of color and luminance of HDR enables a more immersive, realistic experience. You’ll be able to see the details of haunting movement in dark shadows rather than just black. The bright sun will be a more radiant, warm yellow rather than a flat saturated white, but unless the game is displaying on your monitor with that improved dynamic range, you won’t get the benefits of a more immersive experience even if you have an HDR capable monitor.
While some game studios develop for HDR gaming PCs by mastering their game natively for HDR, Auto HDR for PC will take DirectX 11 or DirectX 12 SDR-only games and intelligently expand the color/brightness range up to HDR. It’s a seamless platform feature that will give you an amazing new gaming experience that takes full advantage of your HDR monitor’s capabilities. The Auto in the title implies how easy it is for you to enable the feature; a simple settings toggle flip will let you turn the feature on and off.
Hannah @ Microsoft’s DirectX Developer Blog
If you want to give the Auto HDR feature a try, you will need to be in the Windows Insider Program and be on Windows 10 build 21337. You can read up more on this feature and what you need to do to get in by going on over to the blog post or you can simply be a patient human being and not run incomplete operating systems. Then again, if you love the bleeding edge of things, you likely were not going to listen to this advice anyway.
