NVIDIA Pascal Goes Full In with HDR Support for Games and 4K Streaming for Movies

As usual for a new graphics carte, almost of the focus surrounding the paper launch of the GTX 1080 Pascal-based GPU was on its performance. However, the new card also sports a number of interesting new features similar Simultaneous Multi-Project, Fast Sync and Ansel.

This commodity, on the other hand, focuses on what's maybe been the to the lowest degree talked virtually characteristic: HDR support. Before this year, at CES 2022, AMD presented their HDR Initiative and now NVIDIA is answering with Pascal.

In terms of hardware functionality, the new cards volition add together the post-obit to what was already available in Maxwell (12-bit colour depth, BT.2020 wide color gamut, SMPTE 2084 (Perceptual Quantization), and HDMI 2.0b 10/12b for 4K HDR):

4K@60hz 10/12b HEVC Decode (for HDR Video)
4K@60hz 10b HEVC Encode (for HDR recording & streaming)
DP 1.four ready HDR Metadata Transport (to connect to HDR displays using DP)

Apparently, hardware support alone isn't plenty and NVIDIA announced to be working with several studios to implement HDR in the following games:

Ascension of the Tomb Raider
Paragon
Shadow Warrior two
The Witness
Lawbreakers
The Talos Principle
Obduction

Co-ordinate to what NVIDIA stated in the presentation embedded below, the implementation is pretty straightforward which lines up with Microsoft's argument on the thing. That'due south considering modern games typically already render HDR and mostly what needs to be done is to update the tone mapper to make it HDR aware, and and then integrate some API calls so that the game can find the HDR display and put it in HDR mode.

HDR monitors aren't coming until early on next twelvemonth, though, but NVIDIA has you covered in case y'all've bought 1 of the few HDR TVs available now.

If yous ain a SHIELD device, you'll be able to use GameStream to bask HDR titles on your HDR-compatible TV every bit shown in the paradigm above.

But that's not all. NVIDIA Pascal is too the first GPU to allow 4K streaming on PC via Microsoft's PlayReady 3.0 standard. Dave Bossio, Group Program Managing director at Microsoft, said:

The Pascal GPU family meets the highest standards for PlayReady 3.0 (SL3000). Meeting these stringent standards will enable the Pascal GPU family to play dorsum the best premium video content on Windows PCs.

NVIDIa is likewise working with Netflix, so you'll exist able to practise 4K streaming of their library if you own a Pascal GPU. Speculation is that PlayReady 3.0 will be needed for UltraHD Blu-ray content, as well.