(Pocket-lint) – When the Xbox Series X and S came out late last year they brought a few new tricks with them on the technical side, to go with increases in power and speed. One of these was Auto HDR, a setting that adds imitated HDR to games that didn’t ship with the feature.
That can make for more depth in colours and richer scenes even in older games, making the most of displays with HDR tech and enriching your back catalogue, and we’ve been impressed by how much it can do.
Now, that tech is spreading through Microsoft’s portfolio a bit further – it’s available to test on PC through the Windows Insider Program, potentially unlocking the feature for more than 1,000 games on PC.
It works for games running on DirectX 11 or 12, which are relatively recent versions, but that still covers a massive slab of titles, and brings nice improvements to them. Of course, if you find that a game’s visuals actually don’t work too well with Auto HDR, you can always disable it.
The above heatmap from Microsoft gives you an idea for how close Auto HDR can come to imitating the extra detail provided by true, native HDR, and it’s suitably impressive. The setting also shouldn’t be particularly taxing on your GPU – it’ll require a small bump in performance, but nothing staggering, according to Microsoft.
Writing by Max Freeman-Mills.
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