News Expert asserts Mario Kart World is a 'fake HDR' Nintendo Switch 2 title — ‘Mario Kart World reveals that even the highest caliber of developers are...

[Admin]

Mario Kart World appears to have been developed using 'an SDR-first content pipeline with a last-minute HDR tonemap.'

Expert asserts Mario Kart World is a 'fake HDR' Nintendo Switch 2 title — ‘Mario Kart World reveals that even the highest caliber of developers are... : Read more

 

[thestryker]

The console itself has an edge lit LCD display and I'd be shocked if the predominant use case for a Switch device wasn't in hand. Nintendo didn't take the hardware HDR seriously so I'm not sure why anyone would worry about it much on the software side.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Right now it doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense for game developers to really care about HDR given the percentage of people who can take advantage of HDR is incredibly small and the percentage of that who have an OLED screen capable of fully rendering it is even smaller. Now if the Switch 2 had an HDR OLED edition it would be a different story, but as mentioned above it has an edge lit LCD so there's no reason for first party Switch 2 games to be geared to HDR.

 

[HardwareExpert]

Right now it doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense for game developers to really care about HDR given the percentage of people who can take advantage of HDR is incredibly small and the percentage of that who have an OLED screen capable of fully rendering it is even smaller. Now if the Switch 2 had an HDR OLED edition it would be a different story, but as mentioned above it has an edge lit LCD so there's no reason for first party Switch 2 games to be geared to HDR.

Rumor has it, you can hook this video game system up to a screen that isn’t embedded in the device. The world’s leading scientists are still searching for confirmation.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Rumor has it, you can hook this video game system up to a screen that isn’t embedded in the device. The world’s leading scientists are still searching for confirmation.

Yes, but the problem of the vast majority of people not owning a TV capable of proper HDR, or even HDR at all, still applies.

 

[Will808]

Disappointing but not surprising. The console's internal HDR calibration tool is a completely subtly broken too. It's not entirely properly configured to the HDR standard and far exceeds it's max brightness range, also assuming the TV is used has a setting toggled on that isn't even on every high end TV. And incompetently is set for x10 way too much granularity. Some people will properly follow the HDR calibration directions in their Switch 2 only to get a horribly misconfigured HDR that looks washed out and more like SDR. And it's not their fault, it's the Switch 2's HDR calibration tool not being good for tons of TVs despite those TVs having capable HDR. This is not just the consoles display not being good enough for proper HDR it is large software issues that impact TVs too dealing with the OS

This is disappointing because HDR in gaming is important. Using my Steam Deck OLED I realized that true proper HDR that's well color coded makes a bigger difference than going from Low to Epic settings in a game like Halo Infinite while having no FPS cost. Now that we have the first opportunity to code it in standard Nintendo needs to fix this.

 

[circadia]

Yes, but the problem of the vast majority of people not owning a TV capable of proper HDR, or even HDR at all, still applies.

eh, it's 2025, not 2015? surely the people buying Switch 2 are also far more likely to have a TV with proper HDR?

 

[Alex/AT]

And now fake fake is fake.
Whatever 'HDR' I saw and see everywhere, it looks just like overcontrast version of the normal image.
Yeah, I can imagine someone can like this subjectively, but it's far away from the sensible plane.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

Right now it doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense for game developers to really care about HDR given the percentage of people who can take advantage of HDR is incredibly small and the percentage of that who have an OLED screen capable of fully rendering it is even smaller. Now if the Switch 2 had an HDR OLED edition it would be a different story, but as mentioned above it has an edge lit LCD so there's no reason for first party Switch 2 games to be geared to HDR.

Why are you defending what pretty much constitutes false advertising? If the devs thought HDR owners were so few that it wasn’t worth their efforts then they should have left it as an SDR game.
I got two OLED HDR capable screens at home and many others I know personally who have at least an HDR TV. I’m pretty sure it applies to anyone who went TV shopping the past 5 years. Hell it’s probably more difficult nowadays to buy a TV that doesn’t have HDR.

 

[adamboy64]

Wasn't it revealed that Mario Kart World was originally penned as a Switch 1 title..?
It would make sense that HDR was an afterthought.

 

[3JAD21]

Wasn't it revealed that Mario Kart World was originally penned as a Switch 1 title..?
It would make sense that HDR was an afterthought.

Exactly. Also, consider that, based on the hardware leaks we've seen, the hardware inside the Switch 2 was finalised in 2022. That means there were 3 years between when the developers found out the final, proper specs of the Switch 2, and the game's release. It makes perfect sense that HDR was an afterthought for the developers.

Slightly unrelated, but I want to correct something that was written in the article: at no point has Nintendo claimed that Mario Kart World is a 4K 60fps title, and that's because it isn't: it's a 1440p 60fps title. I've been seeing stuff like this a lot lately: people claiming, without evidence, that a plethora of games on the Switch 2 run at 4K docked, when the vast majority of them are running at either 1080p or 1440p. I think there's only, like, 3 or 4 Switch 2 games (and some Switch 1 updated games) that currently play at 4K? None of them are the same games people are claiming are 4K (some people have gone as far as to suggest that Cyberpunk 2077 runs at 4K, which is absolutely laughable).

 

[mo_osk]

And now fake fake is fake.
Whatever 'HDR' I saw and see everywhere, it looks just like overcontrast version of the normal image.
Yeah, I can imagine someone can like this subjectively, but it's far away from the sensible plane.

Ultimatelly HDR is just more color and brightness information being accessible when an asset is created and the game visuals are put together. It's what the designer and the developer do with it that will make a difference. And if you just want to have more realism, SDR simply can't reproduce color's intensity and bright light in the same way. Simply put HDR is just more true to life.

But it can be difficult to spot the difference in some scenes, because not everything is very bright and colorful, and that make some people, including creators, use more contrast to get what they think shoud be an HDR look.

But a very bright and well calibrated HDR monitor can truelly trick your brain into thinking that it is looking at a window and not a screen. Once you have experienced that you get that HDR is not a gadget, it should just be the standard (and it pretty much always was in the theaters).

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

eh, it's 2025, not 2015? surely the people buying Switch 2 are also far more likely to have a TV with proper HDR?

Massive doubt. Even though the HDR10 spec has been around for 10 years, even TVs from earlier this decade, like my high end (at the time) LG Nano90 (2021), doesn't really do great HDR, not to mention all those "Black Friday Special" large but cheap TVs from low end brands that people love to get, especially for children's rooms.