Last-gen games · HDR10 · Fire TV Cube
Your OLD games are HDR inside
Games from the PS3 and PS4 era already light their scenes in HDR. Flag the console's output as HDR10 and an HDR TV opens that light back up.
Why they're HDR inside
Inside the engine, most PS3- or PS4-era games work their lighting in HDR: the sun, a muzzle flash and a dark corridor all get their real brightness, far beyond what a TV of the time could show. At the end of every frame, the game squeezes that light into an SDR picture. This step is called tone mapping, and it's there because SDR was what TVs took back then. The PS3's HDMI out (HDMI 1.3) is incapable of HDR.
The bright and dark parts aren't thrown away though. They're packed into the ends of the signal, so a dark alley and its lights end up a few values apart instead of miles apart like we see things in real life.
Game engines have rendered this way for over a decade. Most of your favorite games like Destiny, Call of Duty, Last of Us, Uncharted, and more have been doing this before HDR TVs existed.
What the TV does with it
An SDR TV and an HDR10 TV turn the same signal values into brightness with different curves. HDR10 uses a curve called PQ, which spends its top values on far brighter light. Tell the TV the console's picture is HDR10 and it reads the game's own values on that curve. The packed-in highlights open back out toward the TV's peak brightness, and every tone stays in order.
How close it lands
Close, but not mastered HDR. Computed for typical game tone-map curves (generic curves, not measured from any one game), here is where mid-grey lands when the signal is read as HDR10:
| Tone-map curve | Mid-grey read as HDR10 | HDR reference |
|---|---|---|
| Hable filmic | 30 nits | 26 nits |
| ACES fit | 36 nits | 26 nits |
| Reinhard | 43 nits | 26 nits |
The reference is the HDR level for mid-grey in ITU-R BT.2408. Mid-tones land near where HDR content puts them, and highlights get real HDR headroom. What's still off:
- Contrast through the mid-tones runs steeper than the game's own light: deep shadows sit a little low and bright mid-tones a little hot.
- Banding. 8-bit values read as PQ take bigger brightness steps than under SDR, so smooth gradients can band.
- Sharpness. Edges and texture get more contrast too, so some scenes look crunchier than the game meant.
How the Fire TV Cube does it
The Fire TV Cube (3rd gen) has an HDMI input. With HDMI Input Passthrough on, it sends the console's own signal to the TV instead of rescaling it. From a plain ADB shell on the same network, you can tell its HDMI output to carry the HDR10 flag. Fire OS keeps putting SDR back, so a small script, the keeper, keeps sending the flag.
Measured with a PS3 game over 12 minutes, the Cube's output read HDR10 in 97.6% of checks, with no blink visible on the TV.
- Console → Cube → TV. The console plugs into the Cube's HDMI input, and the Cube plugs into an HDR10 TV.
- Set up the Cube once: Developer Options and ADB Debugging on, HDMI Input Passthrough on, Dynamic Range set to Adaptive.
- Start the keeper from a computer on the same network. The TV switches to HDR and stays there while the game runs.
What it's been tested on
- Fire TV Cube, 3rd gen (2022), model AFTGAZL. Other Fire TV devices are untested, and most have no HDMI input.
- TV: Samsung S95B.
- Games: Black Ops II and Resident Evil 6 on a PS3, and Black Ops III (the PS4 version) on a PS5.