The Witcher 3 · Native HDR Fix Mod

[OopyDoopy]

RenoDX Mod by Jon (OopyDoopy/Kickfister)

Gallery

About

The native HDR for The Witcher 3 is quite flawed; it's not actually HDR. The game runs the exact same tonemapper as SDR which clamps to SDR range. The game gets brighter than SDR because post processing happens after tonemapping. In SDR, this means post processing has detail that gets clipped away, which is why the HDR presentation has a little something for highlights, but still looks very SDR otherwise. This mod rewrites the tonemapper to blend the color of their tonemapper without clipping it and defers actual HDR tonemapping until after post processing occurs. Post processing shaders have also been adjusted to function correctly with this fundamental shift.

Files

ReShade Download

RenoDX Latest Snapshot

Instructions

This mod requires the DX12 renderer to function!

1. Download the above ReShade installer and RenoDX addon.
2. Install ReShade and renodx-thewitcher3.addon64 to the location of the game's dx12 executable: <install path>\bin\x64_dx12
3. To improve performance in some scenes, disable the generic reshade addons that are on by default (Generic Depth and Effect Runtime Sync).

That's it. The mod overrides in-game options, so adjust peak brightness and game brightness/paper white in the mod menu. Out of the box, the mod is configured to be extremely vanilla friendly. There's also an "HDR Look" preset with settings I've tuned (used for the screenshots above).

Compatibility

• Should be broadly compatible with weather/lighting mods! If you run into issues with any one in particular, please report it to me.
• Broadly speaking, this will be incompatible with ReShade presets. They may work okay enough, but use at your own risk. Almost all ReShade effects are made for SDR.

[KarlJovanick]

Impossible to download the RenoDX file

[OopyDoopy]

What exactly was the problem? I checked and the links work for me.

[pritster5]

Your file keeps triggering Windows Defender AV. Both on here and on the Nexus files upload.

[OopyDoopy]

That's unfortunately just an issue we have to deal with for all of our mods. There's nothing I can do, it's borderline random if a new build does or doesn't get flagged. All I can really do is tell you that the code is available here, and the snapshot in this post is built by github with that code.

[alpha54net]

@pritster5 Sorry for very late reply, only just came across this mod and am keen to use it and saw this discussion. Certain types of mods will trigger Windows Defender's "machine learning based" detection pretty much 100% of the time. A good initial sign that this is happening is that the name of whatever trojan it thinks it has detected ends in "!ml."

As an end user, once you know that it's likely a false positive and you want to use the mod - but still be security conscious - it takes less than five clicks to upload the file to VirusTotal and get an overview of how 70+ vendors' AV engines classify the file, as well as if their automated sandbox analysis triggers anything.

In the case of this snapshop build specifically, you can see that 0 out of 72 AV vendor engines classify it as malicious: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/578425c3f6c676c6619d36973d4be5a5694976468d3180f47d3b45eb2138d98c

@OopyDoopy Not sure if worth thinking about or not, but I know some mod authors like to include the VirusTotal links with their releases in anticipation of people being thrown by this issue. That's probably not a realistic/worth the effort approach with snapshot builds that are still constantly changing, but for uploads to Nexus or elsewhere it might make sense?

Regardles - thank you so much for this - v excited to drop it into TW3!

[emilio3422]

theres no peak brightness slider in the mod or anything mentioning paper white for me

[OopyDoopy]

Just to be safe, make sure you have HDR enabled in Windows.

Also, sometimes there's a bug with swapchain detection that can crop up, particularly when other mods are involved. It's a byproduct of the SDR support the mod has. The sliders will probably show up if you switch to windowed mode and back to borderless.

[emilio3422]

Yea, switching to windowed back to borderless fixed it, thank you