Samsung and game developer Nexon have announced a partnership to bring the first HDR10+ gaming experience to Windows PC users. Nexon's The First Descendant will be released as a free-to-play (F2P) title, with the open beta available for download from September 19. You will be able to see and hear more about the Samsung and Nexon HDR10+ partnership at Gamescom, which kicks off later this week.
HDR10+ was co-established by Samsung way back in 2018, and it was first announced to the public in 2021. Its key advance is adding a layer of metadata to the HDR10 signal for real-time communication between PC, screen and software - optimizing the display scene by scene, and frame by frame.
At long last, today's announcement heralds that the first HDR10+ game is coming soon. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a wave of titles supporting this standard on PCs, as it sounds rather convenient and carries the potential to iron out the undeniably clunky HDR support on Windows PCs.
According to Samsung, HDR10+ "ushers in a new era of gaming," as it provides the following features:
- Deeper color, contrast and brightness
- More accurate depiction of details in dark shadows and bright highlights
- Automatic setup, which eliminates the hassle of adjusting numerous manual settings
- Folds in gaming performance features like low latency and variable refresh rate support
- Claimed to deliver consistent and reliable HDR gaming experiences across all HDR10+ Gaming displays
The key benefit of HDR10+ seems to be gaining all the niceties of HDR10, with real-time metadata, and some gaming performance optimizations thrown in, all done in a frictionless automatic manner.
All you need is HDR10+ compliant hardware and games which support it to enjoy HDR10+ experiences. On PC, that will likely mean an HDR10+ Gaming monitor from Samsung, like one of the Odyssey 7 series and above. Moreover, your graphics card will need an HDR10+ enabling driver. Nvidia GeForce users got support for the HDR10+ Gaming standard starting last November. Finally, some software that supports HDR10+ will be necessary, and that starts with The First Descendant - a third-person looter shooter which also boasts 13 playable characters, as well as graphics tech like UE5 Lumen & Nanite, DLSS 2 & 3, and more.
We are looking forward to the first reports of HDR10+ and The First Descendant at Gamescom, and during the open beta. As with most monitor technologies, you really have to see and experience them first-hand to get a measure of the benefits.
