r/Borderlands2

I've been working on a native HDR solution for Borderlands 2 on PC/Steam, and a new beta is out on GitHub:

Borderlands 2 — Native HDR (bl2hdr)

https://github.com/raspy-corroded3/borderlands2-native-hdr

The goal is proper HDR output in BL2 without ReShade or Windows Auto HDR. It's a drop-in d3d9.dll: copy two files into the game folder and you're done.

New in 1.0.1-beta.1: HDR settings right in the game's menu. Go to Options → Video → HDR, just below Window Mode:

The new HDR row in Options → Video

It opens a page with HDR On/Off and sliders for everything. Changes apply live, so you can tune it while looking at the game:

The HDR settings page: game, HUD and cutscene brightness, peak brightness and highlight strength

What it does

- Native HDR output for Borderlands 2 (Windows HDR, no Auto HDR)

- In-game HDR settings page in the Video menu: works with mouse, keyboard and controller

- Separate brightness for the game world, the HUD/menus and cutscenes

- Adjustable peak brightness and highlight strength

- Built-in peak-brightness test pattern to match your display

- Clean exit with a message if your graphics driver crashes, instead of a frozen game

- Automatic borderless mode when HDR is enabled

- No ReShade, no mod manager

The idea is to keep the original BL2 look while letting the sun, sky, fire, explosions and other bright highlights actually use your HDR display.

About cutscenes: they stay SDR, because the videos themselves are SDR. They now look exactly like the original game, with their own brightness slider. The first beta could show some cutscenes slightly too bright; that's fixed.

Known issue: BL2 is a 32-bit game, and the HDR path uses a bit more of its 4 GB memory limit. If you ever get "ran out of video memory" after a long session, set PoolSize=256 under [TextureStreaming] in WillowEngine.ini. The README has the details.

It's still a beta, and I've only been able to test on one setup (NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti, HDR600 monitor). I'd really like reports from people with AMD or Intel GPUs, laptops with two GPUs, and different HDR monitors and TVs.

If you have an HDR monitor or TV and Borderlands 2 on PC, I'd love to know how it looks on your setup.

Download:

https://github.com/raspy-corroded3/borderlands2-native-hdr/releases

Feedback, bug reports, screenshots and testing results are very welcome. For bugs, the bl2hdr.log file next to Borderlands2.exe helps a lot.

Thank you for your time ❤️

here.