Cross Platform HDR Output
The following is intended for informational purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. No purchasing decisions should be made based on the following materials. Unity is not committing to deliver any functionality, features or code. The development, timing and release of all products, functionality and features are at the sole discretion of Unity, and are subject to change.
If you have accepted to use functional cookies and logged in using your Unity ID at the top right of the page, then sharing feedback is as simple as clicking a card below, selecting a topic’s importance, adding your point of view, and submitting. If you prefer not to accept functional cookies or log in, you will be prompted to enter an email address and validate it, so we know how to reach out when the topic evolves. For more information read the Feedback and privacy terms.
Summary
High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays are now becoming widely available, and are capable of reproducing images with higher peak brightness and wider color gamut, in order to achieve better contrast (highlights/shadows) and color saturation. This results in more realistic variations in luminance across scenes, increased surface detail and improved depth perception.
Due to an historical lack of HDR capable displays, tonemapping is often used to remap the color buffer’s HDR content into a low dynamic range (0-1), before finally outputting the results into the back buffer for eventual display.
Unity 2022.1 introduced HDR Display support for the High Definition Rendering Pipeline when targeting desktop and console platforms. This works by setting the device native color space when creating the swapchain, and using custom HDR tonemapping in order to remap the color buffer’s content into the display native HDR range. User scripts can access the HDR display settings using HDROutputSettings.
HDR Display support is extended to the Universal Rendering Pipeline in Unity 2023.1, with initial platform support for desktop, consoles and select XR devices.
Support for compatible mobile devices is introduced in Unity 2023.2.