Back at CES in January, Nvidia announced a new RTX Video HDR feature. It can transform SDR videos streamed via a web browser into HDR videos on compatible displays, so it's a nifty little trick that makes videos look better if your display can handle it. The technology uses the GPUs' tensor cores to achieve this effect, and now an enterprising modder has figured out how to apply this to games, including older DX9 and DX11 titles. Though "free HDR" is cool on its own, the fact that this is possible hints at the possibility that Nvidia is already working on something similar.
The NvTrueHDR - RTX HDR for games mod is a free download on Nexxusmods if you have registered for an account. As always, it's wise to be careful with third-party software, but the mod's developer—who goes by emoose—appears to be a well-known entity in the modding community, so it seems like a safe download. The mod allows you to enable HDR in almost any game thanks to what the author describes as some hidden "TrueHDR" files in the Nvidia 551.31 driver that enabled RTX Video HDR. Emoose says it works in DX9, DX10, DX11, DX12, and possibly even Vulkan and OpenGL games, but given its nascent status, the community needs to test it on a variety of games and report what works and what doesn't.
The mod aims to enable HDR on games that don't officially support it while being more reliable than the clunky AutoHDR built into Windows 11. That feature must be disabled for it even to work, and you must have an HDR10-compatible display as well. According to Nvidia, RTX Video HDR uses its GPUs' tensor cores to reveal highlights and colors suppressed by the standard compression in today's streaming videos. This same effect is applied in games, but there's no free lunch. As Tweaktown notes, some people on Reddit have noted it can incur a steep performance penalty in some games.
If you want to try the mod out, you must be comfortable with the command line (a dying art these days). When you run the NvTrueHDR.exe file, it prompts you to enter the game on which you want to run it. Once it locates the appropriate EXE file, you can select the quality level of the HDR implementation. The mod author also notes the highest quality level can impose a 10% performance penalty, so tread carefully. Also, the author doesn't include a list of compatible GPUs, so we'll just assume it works on any RTX card since those have tensor cores, meaning RTX 20-series and newer.
