Hi everyone,
I spent the last two month trying to find the optimal picture processing settings (for me) during games. Here are some general conclusions, further down you will find specifics for each setting. I play on the Xbox Series X, games tested include battlefield 5, Forza Horizon 4, assassins Creed Vahlhalla, Elder Scrolls online, Ori will of the wisp, Gears 5.
-except local dimming no setting improves the capability limits for contrast or brightness of your tv, they are rather illusions which made me perceive the picture differently and on some scenes for the better.
-what looks best varies quite significantly from scene to scene, therefore i was not able to find a mix that looks best for all scenes.
-apart from the ,,basic“ Settings like Gamma, brightness etc. live color and contrast enhancer has the biggest impact on the picture
-i needed to watch the changes for many, many times (I spent at least 3-4 hours everyday adjusting settings) to really understand what the setting really did to the picture as opposed to ,,perceived“ effects
Here are my thoughts on each setting:
-except of gamma I left the basic settings like brightness, black level, sharpness and contrast mostly untouched at their recommended hdr values
-Black adjust: here it starts to get interesting: it does NOT improve the blacklevel capability of the tv. It simply shifts darker tones closer to or equaling black what might cause a loss of shadow detail. Of course a brighter tone looks more contrasty next to a black one than to a grey one, however the grey tone will be lost. I didn’t like the value of simply having more dark tones on the screen.
-contrast enhancer: this is an interesting setting i worked a lot with: it does NOT enhance the contrast ratio limit of your tv, it simply shifts brighter tones closer to the brightness limit and darker tones closer to the black level limit what implicates a loss or rather tonal change of the shifted tones, what could easily seen in the Xbox sdr calibration settings. Therefore it makes brighter tones, which aren’t already at the brightness limit, brighter and darker tones, which aren‘t already at the blackness level limit darker, which results in an increased perceived contrast at the cost of tone richness. If you set it higher the algorithm will shift the tones further up and down on that scale which leeds to a loss of detail since increasingly more tones will become indistinguishably once they are shifted into the brightness/blackness limit level which leads to a perceived loss of contrast in those extremes since you loose the relative reference tone. I liked the increases punchiness of non-brightness limit specular highlights but found the tonal loss on ,,high“ too much. I found low or medium (can‘t decide yet) to be the most beneficial in most cases.
-local dimming: it indeed does improve the contrast and the brightness of the tv with blooming being the only drawback on low and medium setting. On high it shifts bright tones to the brightness limit causing their loss. I found medium to be the most beneficial.
-x-tended dynamic range pro: i haven’t worked a lot with this one, so no comment here.
-color saturation: I left this at 50 most of the time, it is even more of a taste kind of setting without much complexity/tradeoffs. it might be useful to counteract the perceived color saturation boost from the high live color setting.
- live color: this was the hardest to judge, most inconsistent yet most impactful setting for me which‘s perception changed a lot over time. At first I simply perceived a boost in color saturation and brightness (especially on high) but later I realized the color tone rarely changes, its rather (I lack a better description) how a colour is lightened up. When you are used to non live colour settings, colors might seem too saturated and, especially in already cartoonishly looking games, too caricative. However after a while the picture looked too dull and dim for me without. The impact ranges from little to no difference (on high setting it always does makes a difference) in some scenes (especially color rich daylight scenes) to a massive increase in brightness and perceived colour liveliness (especially on high) resulting in a much more impactful and sometimes stunning picture. The difference between medium and high is in many scenes quite massive since it makes everything appearing so much brighter. On forza and battlefield however the brightness didn’t change much most of the time, even though the colour appearance changed similarly. In dark scenes the brightness makes night scenes not nightly looking at all, whereas medium keeps the overall atmosphere quite true to the default settings. I however sometimes noticed a shift in colour tones. Especially in darker scenes some blueish tones got a purple touch to it. Adjusting the red proportion in the basic color adjustment settings didn’t help. I feel like low and medium changes the color perception within the default tone mapping while the high setting breaks out of the restraint and seeks pure impact to sometimes stunning results which make even more neutral looking scenes impactful. Interestingly the perceived brightness change of the high setting was much smaller in the high quality demo movies and videos I watched and I found the high setting very beneficial in pretty much all scenes.
In gaming it’s much more inconsistent and its benefits change drastically from scene to scene and from game to game what is especially an issue in games with dynamic lighting within a daytime simulation circle, what is a shame since you simply miss out on those great peak daylight scenes (which are especially impressive in assassins creed Valhalla) when you set it to medium or lower. My Tipp is to Analyse what kind of scenes are predominant if you have a lighting wise more static type of game and adjust the setting accordingly.
Reality creation:
The tv basically renders the picture intern in a much higher resolution and determines what a pixel should display based on the upscaled picture instead of the original signal (source: internet tech sites). This results in a much more defined image on highe resolution settings, what is very beneficial for me. The limit of this technology are very fine structures (e.g. distant tree leaves), I guess the number of pixels is not enough to represent the calculated average in those cases. This results in in very small bright spots within these structures. I found a value of 60 to be the most beneficial.
Motion Interpolation:
The consensus is to leave this off during game mode because of the increased input lag. According to rtings the input lag increases by 60 ms if you have it enabled outside of game mode. According to Wikipedia most people find a total (=input device like controller+pc/console delay+tv delay too distracting. The total input lag for most 30fps games is between 100and 160 milliseconds. If you bring the framerate to 60 (what Interpolation basically does) the response time is lowered by 40-70 milliseconds. At 120fps (smoothness slider at max) the input lag decreases by an other 10-20 ms. So in 30 FPS games you can counteract a good chunk of the increased input lag through the FPS increase. The benefit is a much sharper picture in motion which i found very beneficial since you are moving most of the time during gaming. However there are sometimes some lagg like stutters when you interpolate the picture from 30fps all the way up to 120 which weren’t there at a 60 to 120 FPS interpolation. The benefit of a 60-120 interpolation is significantly smaller but I still found the increased motion sharpness very valuable.
I don’t have much knowledge about the advanced color settings so in left them mostly untouched.
