u/LumenHDR

I ran the new Square Enix HD-2D UE5 action RPG through RenoDX and compared it with the standard SDR version. The split-screen comparison covers the overworld, walking through Philadelphia, the Unexplored Ruins, and a boss fight.

The game looks amazing, but it's still stuck in standard SDR. RenoDX does a great job of revealing true nits and details, which makes a huge difference to the visual experience.

► HDR Technical Specs:
- RenoDX UE Extended
- 3000+ Nits Peak Luminance
- Wide Color Gamut (WCG)
- Optimized for OLED, Mini-LED & High-end HDR Displays

Happy to answer questions about the mod setup if anyone's curious.

The black level lift in this demo is really noticeable, everything in shadow areas looks slightly grey instead of true black, which gives that washed out feel a lot of people are mentioning. The fix is usually simple on the user side, just lowering the black level using reshade shaders or shadow detail slider in the in game HDR mod menu. It won't fix the underlying tone mapping curve, but it goes a long way toward getting actual black back instead of that grey haze over everything.

📺 HDR Technical Specs:

- RenoDX WIP Addon
- 3000+ Nits Peak Luminance
- Wide Color Gamut (WCG)
- Optimized for OLED, Mini-LED & High-end HDR10 Displays

► MODS:
🔗 Mod RTGI & RTAO: The Onimusha WotS Demo only ships with basic RT reflections out of the box. This mod unlocks RTGI and RTAO, bringing ray-traced global illumination and ambient occlusion to the demo for the first time. Everything is controlled from a single clean toggle in the REFramework Script UI.
https://www.nexusmods.com/onimushawayofthesword/mods/20

🔗 Mod Enhanced Lighting: Capcom's lighting in Onimusha WotS leaves some areas feeling flat or underlit, particularly when using RTGI mod, where the absence of light sources becomes more noticeable. This mod addresses that by carefully placing custom lights that respect the tone and atmosphere of each area, while selectively disabling certain default game lights that produce clashing or incorrect results. The end goal is a lighting experience that feels like it could have shipped with the game, with a few personal touches added where it matters most.
https://www.nexusmods.com/onimushawayofthesword/mods/19

🛠️ Required Dependency, REFramework: https://github.com/praydog/REFramework-nightly/releases

RenoDX overhauls the game's rendering features. It includes updated screen space shadows and shading for various materials. It also has an adjusted auto exposure and controls for bloom, lens flares, chromatic aberration, and sharpening. It also rewrites the tone mapping pipeline for SDR and HDR, drastically improving visuals and offering extensive controls.

I used RenoDX defaults settings. This was recorded using RenoDX before the last patches were released. I know the developer is continuously updating the game, which is currently ruining the RenoDX implementation.

Depending on your display, the difference in night lighting, contrast, and highlights is massive.

How RenoDX looks for you and what do you think about the mod changes and possibilities or do you prefer the native developer look?

https://preview.redd.it/fbirvcs8n29h1.png?width=1251&format=png&auto=webp&s=726cf38891cb7a03e6a466f23e86ac4d09f415bc

https://preview.redd.it/emn63hbcn29h1.png?width=1258&format=png&auto=webp&s=1147bb186c5c805c3c044b8fe59a14192a468a52

Both just went live on GitHub.

DLSS SDK 310.7.0 release

• Improved tracking of resources and frames in Nsight Graphics and Nsight Systems
• Bug Fixes & Stability Improvements

Streamline SDK 2.12.0 release

• Bug Fixes & Stability Improvements

The Nsight tracking improvement is a quiet but useful one, better resource/frame visibility means devs can diagnose DLSS integration issues faster, which could translate to fewer games shipping with broken presets or bad frame pacing down the line.

As for the stability fixes... historically these "boring" maintenance drops have quietly carried image quality improvements that don't make it into the headline. Fingers crossed this one does too. DLSS Swapper/NVPI/RHI users keep an eye out for the updated DLLs.

I did a full side by side comparison between Original DX9 and SotFS DX11, no mods, same areas, same lighting conditions.

SotFS has a noticeably more aggressive contrast curve than the original. It's severe enough to cause visible clipping in highlights and crushed detail in shadows. The image ends up looking flatter and more artificial, with a greenish tint in the entire game that pulls it away from DX9's more natural color balance. This isn't subjective, even the community fix mods for SotFS DX11 list "green filter" and "lighting or contrast clipping" as known issues they specifically correct.

Most of the "improvements" people credit to DX11 are barely noticeable in actual gameplay. Particle effects, texture sharpness, none of it stood out to me. The one real difference is better ambient occlusion and darker shadow areas, which honestly lines up more with the contrast and clipping issues than an actual visual upgrade.

I genuinely think the original DX9 release still looks better. The excessive contrast and that green filter work against Drangleic's atmosphere instead of enhancing it.

What I find interesting is how much of this gets lost in the "SotFS is just better" narrative. A lot of people repeating that maybe have never actually put both versions side by side. And on top of that, not even the original DX9 release matches what was shown in the 2013 IGN E3 reveal or the network test betas before launch, there's a well documented downgrade there too. So we're really talking about three different versions of this game's intended look, and SotFS isn't necessarily the closest one to it.

Performance in this demo is a bit rough right now, with frequent stuttering throughout exploration or before certain events that breaks the otherwise tense atmosphere Frogwares is clearly going for. The studio has been upfront that this build is still in active development and optimization is ongoing, so there is real work needed before the August 18 release if the final game is going to run as smoothly as the atmosphere deserves.

Steam Community :: Lumen HDR ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ :: Review for Mortal Shell II - Open Beta

The combat, music, bosses and movement improvements alone make this worth everyone's time who bounced off the first game, and the open world gives the series room it always needed. Just fix the HDR situation before launch, the visuals deserve it.

Resident Evil 9 Requiem SDR vs RenoDX HDR side by side comparison captured in 4K with Full Path Tracing.

Now fixed 🙏

Original HDR Issues:
Broken Displaymapping: The game's final color grading LUT seems to apply tonemapping to a fixed peak that is much lower than 10,000 nits. The displaymapping at the end then tries to tonemap down highlights on an image with already significantly reduced highlights. The end result is highlights that undershoot massively on higher nit displays.
Broken Brightness Slider Behavior: The game's brightness controls apply before the final tonemapping/grading LUT. This results in broken contrast/hues/saturation depending on what value you set the slider to.

The Solution:
Fixed Tonemapping: Before displaymapping, peak brightness is boosted to pre-tonemapping levels, so that the display mapper can then map them properly to the expected peak. Peak brightness now behaves as expected and does not undershoot.
Fixed Brightnesss Slider Behavior: The brightness slider has been adjusted to apply after tonemapping. This keeps contrast/hues/saturation more consistent.
Enhanced User Control: Introduces interactive sliders for players to customize their visual experience to their liking, ensuring a more balanced and visually pleasing HDR presentation.

Dear Devs, I think the excessive use of volumetric fog, vignette, and chromatic aberration is ruining the game's visuals. I made a video comparison to illustrate my point.

Valor Mortis ALL Demo Bosses | RenoDX HDR | 4K

Valor Mortis - The Ultimate First-Person Soulslike? | Full New Demo Gameplay | 4K RenoDX HDR

On 2013, IGN premiered 12 minutes of Dark Souls 2 gameplay alongside FromSoftware director Yui Tanimura and Bandai Namco global producer Tak Miyazoe. For a lot of souls fans, what was shown that day is still an open wound.

The lighting was brutal and real. Torches threw harsh shadows across stone walls. Darkness meant actual darkness. The geometry was dense. The atmosphere felt suffocating in the best way. People watching genuinely debated whether the game was targeting next-gen hardware, it looked that different from anything out at the time.

When the final game released in March 2014, that version of Drangleic was gone. The lighting was gutted. The geometry was simplified. FromSoftware addressed it publicly and said nothing that satisfied anyone. Over a decade later that demo still lives rent-free in the heads of everyone who saw it, and the modding community has been chasing its ghost ever since. Nobody has fully caught it yet.

This teaser is for a project I've been working on, restoring that E3 look to Dark Souls 2. This is Dark Souls II brought closer to the vision that was first shown to us back in 2013.

If you've been waiting since 2013 to play THAT version of Dark Souls 2, subscribe and support the project. Your support means everything.

⚠️ Work in Progress, footage shown is subject to change and improvement.

Go Beyond Death!