Madvr HDR Update

[Christian Sohlberg]

Thought that an updated thread for creating 3dlut to use with Madvr and HDR content
was in order.

Been doing alot of testing with Displaycal and Madvr and there are a few things that
I thought that I would share.

1. MadTPG and Windows 10 scaling.

I could´nt get MadTPG to correctly display the measurement window in HDR mode.
The window was all grey and you could clearly see that MadTPG was displayed
using overlay instead of fullscreen exclusive.

By changing the scaling settings under “Display/Scale and layout” to 100% instead
of the 300% default the MadTPG window functioned properly.

2. MadTPG HDR settings.

I keept having an issue where my LG CX Oled only reached 350 nits peak brightness.
The settings recommended in every forum for MadTPG HDR output is to use:

BT2020, 0.000 nits, 10000 nits

By lowering the max nits value in MadTPG I was able to raise my
peak brightness (measured using report on uncalibrated device).

BT2020, 0.000 nits, 10000 nits = 350 nits
BT2020, 0.000 nits, 1000 nits = 580 nits
BT2020, 0.000 nits, 400 nits = 710 nits

3. Displaycal HDR 3dlut

DCI-P3 gamut coverage was also an issue that I was having problems with.
Keept getting a gamut coverage of only ~70% with “XYZ + Matrix” regardless
of the amount of patches.

Found a good discussion on Avsforum where it was mentioned that in order to
get a working profile with enough DCI-P3 gamut coverage to use with HDR you
had to use “Curves + Matrix” and 34 patches.

Using this setting I was able to get 95% DCI-P3 gamut coverage.

At this stage I am only doing profiling and no calibration.
Is this the recommended practice or should I also calibrate to a set whitepoint
and tonecurve?

What do you guys think?

[Kamina X]

You’ve got to be pulling my leg, you sure you aren’t getting a doctored Windows HDR to SDR patch (if the SDR brightness slider dims it then it isn’t real HDR)? I can’t get Display Cal to send an HDR patch to Madtpg for the life of me. It will only send SDR data that has been doctored by7 windows HDR to SDR conversion which is not something I would test off of.  HCFR will do it but no joy with Display Cal. It’s really frustrating.

[NoVoicemail]

were you able to make any progress? i have all the same problems as you.

[Old Man]

Bump

[Old Man]

Reinstalling the nvidia driver temporarily fixes this

[Anonymous]

I tried to post a separate topic for this, but for some reason it seems stuck in moderation, so I thought here was the next best thing.

How to create a madVR beta 3D LUT with DisplayCAL for HDR input to HDR output

DISCLAIMER: These steps are most likely technically incorrect, the worst kind of incorrect! However, for me, they have provided the most visually pleasing results yet.

For my setup, the end result of how videos look is day and night compared to passthrough HDR or madVR tone mapping without a 3D LUT, so well worth it, especially for those videos that otherwise appear washed-out.

I’m going to try to keep this post concise, as pretty much just a list of steps that worked for me. That said, thank you to Christian who worked out some of the more obscure steps and to various other posts that helped me put this together.

Note for those using OLED:
I used a wide gamut monitor that has an IPS type panel, from what I understand, if you have an OLED display, following these steps may be a bad idea. As they are probably a bad idea whatever your display type, I don’t see how testing can hurt apart from wasting your time. If anyone with an OLED does try this, I’d be curious to know your results. In any case, from what I gather, if you do want to try this with an OLED, activating the “White level drift compensation” option in DisplayCAL, might be a good idea as well as using a small number of patches. See the following links for more info.

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/lg-2017-oled-calibration-thread-and-settings.2853954/page-66#post-55310736

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/madvr-argyllcms.1471169/page-140?post_id=28543578#post-28543578

—

Hardware required: HDR capable display / ArgyllCMS compatible colorimeter / Nvidia graphics card powerful enough for madvr’s tone mapping with pixel shaders
Software used: DisplayCAL 3.8.9.3 / ArgyllCMS 3.3.0 / MadVR beta 207 / Nvidia driver 566.03 / Win 10 22H2

1. Close all open applications
2. Open Windows “Settings” > “System” > “Display”. Set “Change the size of text, apps and other items” to “100%”
3. Open Windows “Settings” > “Apps” > “Video Playback” > “Windows HD Colour settings”. Set “Use HDR” to “Off”
4. Open madTPG
5. Open madVR settings, go to “devices” > “hdr” for the active profile, set “passthrough HDR to display” and check “send HDR metadata to the display”, go to “calibration” for the active profile and set “disable calibration controls for this display”, then click “OK”.*
6. In madTPG activate HDR by clicking the “HDR” button, on the same button’s dropdown menu set HDR to “400 nits” (for me this is the only way to achieve the display’s full brightness, if I set higher nits the display’s brightness goes down) and colorspace to “BT.2020”. Activate “use fullscreen” by clicking on the corresponding button.
7. Close madTPG
8. Open DisplayCAL
9. In the “Settings” dropdown menu at the top of the window choose “Video 3D LUT for madVR HDR”
10. Go to the “3D LUT” tab and uncheck “Create 3D LUT after profiling”.
11. Optional: Go to the “Profiling” tab. You may want to increase the number of patches, see DisplayCAL documentation for more info.**
12. Optional: Go to the “Display & instrument” tab. You may want to disable “White level drift compensation” depending on your display, and set a “Correction”, see DisplayCAL documentation for more info.
13. Click the “Calibrate & profile” button at the bottom of the window.
14. madTPG should open and activate HDR on your screen
15. Follow the on-screen instructions, see DisplayCAL documentation for more info. Skip the “Start measurement” step and go straight to “Continue on to profiling”
16. Once it has finished, a window will appear, click “Create 3D LUT…”
17. Read this step to the end, as otherwise you will be stuck if you do not know what to do. Click “Install 3D LUT”, madTPG will go into fullscreen and stay like that once you have clicked, get out of fullscreen by clicking (you can’t see the mouse pointer, but it is to make the window active) then pressing “ALT+ENTER”
18. DisplayCAL should display a window with “3D LUT installation successful!”, click “OK”
19. Close madTPG
20. Close DisplayCAL
21. Open an HDR video
22. Open madVR settings, in the active profile under “devices” > “calibration” > “BT. 2020” make sure the path to the 3D LUT just created is set. If not, you can find the path under calibration for
the profile used by madTPG.
23. In the HDR section of the active profile, set “tone map with pixel shaders”, check the tickbox “output HDR” and set “display peak luminance (nits)” to match your display’s max nits. See below for a link to the other settings I used.
24. Close and apply madVR settings by clicking “OK”
25. Watch the video. You can activate a split screen with “CTRL+ALT+SHIFT 3” to see the difference with and without the LUT.

*This is probably a good place to start, however, I got the best visual results measuring using “tone map HDR using pixel shaders” with these settings: https://www.avsforum.com/threads/improving-madvr-hdr-to-sdr-mapping-for-projector-no-support-questions.2954506/page-960?post_id=63582654#post-63582654, changing only “display peak luminance (nits)” to match my display’s max output and activating “output video in HDR format”.

**I tried different numbers of patches. What I found was that from 425 to 833 patches, videos’ saturation and luminance increased with the number of patches. Beyond 833, saturation went up, but luminance went down, so this might be something worth testing for yourself to achieve the best results.

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