HDR found to have a significant impact on Nvidia Graphics performance

High Dynamic Range (HDR) is often heralded as the next big change for monitors and televisions, offering increased colour accuracy through the use of a wider colour gamut while also providing enhanced contrast and detail levels by delivering both deeper black levels and brighter highlights. 

High-end HDR displays and well implemented HDR support in both movies and games can offer an extremely satisfying visual experience, though as Computerbase.de has figured out, this increase in image quality comes at a hardware cost. HDR support isn’t free, though the performance impact of the technology impacts one side of the GPU market more than the other. 

On average, Computerbase.de found that enabling HDR support reduced Nvidia’s graphics performance by around 10% on average, whereas AMD’s framerates dropped by 2% on average, showcasing a vast disparity in each vendor’s HDR support. This change is enough to give AMD’s RX Vega a performance advantage over Nvidia’s GTX 1080 when using HDR, in games where Geforce had an advantage under SDR. 

(Graph from Computerbase.de)

Right now, it remains unclear why AMD’s graphics hardware is impacted less by the addition of HDR. Performance changes vary on a game-by-game basis, leaving it difficult to attribute the framerate drops to a specific cause. Computerbase tested 12 games with HDR on and off to discover the performance impact of HDR. 

Regardless it appears as if AMD’s Radeon graphics hardware is designed to better cope with HDR workloads, which places them in a great position moving forward.      

You can join the discussion on HDR’s impact on Nvidia’s graphics performance on the OC3D Forums.