Path of Exile 2 (DX11 Only) - Native HDR Fix Mod

[SGTForgery]

RenoDX Addon by Forge

Vulkan addon is dead, Reshade / Streamline / addon problems break the game

DX12 is a waiting game until they unblacklist reshade or we figure out a way to get reshade hooked

Gallery

Vanilla sRGB

RenoDX with Gamma 2.2

Vanilla per-pixel jitter noise

RenoDX with noise removed

Breakdown

This is a strange one, Game has three APIs

• DX11 has no native HDR access (toggle is greyed out)
• DX12 HDR is allegedly 8bit per Kaldaien's and others finding
• Vulkan HDR however is indeed using a HDR10 swapchain + RGB10A2_FLOAT textures.

Reshade is completely blacklisted with DX12 only. Both DX11 and VK can hook reshade with devkit working alongside.

Game has no tonemapping, nor any explicit gamma correction (srgb or 2.2) it instead renders completely in linear space with a final sRGB application in the swapchain for either SDR or HDR. Problems that arise with native HDR...

1. Windows does not properly detect a HDR swapchain when HDR is toggled on in DX12. As such not only can AutoHDR be activated on top by accident but the game brightness is controlled by the Windows 'SDR Content Brightness' slider found in the HDR settings tab. ICC profiles also apply to the game

2. Game will overshoot and clip beyond your display peak. There are various scenes such as the main menu, any time a fx from a skill goes off or The Black Chambers (very obvious here) where various light sources around the map peak at +4K nits

3. Has raised black floor in both game scenes and more noticeably in menus such as skill tree due to a lack of gamma 2.2 correction

4. Has an abysmal per-pixel jitter that gets multiplied by a small amount of noise. I have zero idea why it exists, theres no adverse side-effects to removing it. It runs 24/7 in the game as an overlay which means you will never see true blacks. For example, the edges of a dungeon map will have it constantly on or menus.

5. Bloom looks bad in many areas or when large scale area style fx appear, it becomes borked with some major banding

6. Abysmal sharpening if you use NIS or set DLSS sharpen to even 1% (activates a new compute shader for processing sharpening), it exposes the internal jitter used by various temporal elements so everything starts to shimmer even at 1%, avoid at all costs)

Outside of that, the game is pretty good. There are no weird hues on fires or skin, LUTs arent clamped and have good scaling that doesnt cause raised black floor. Resource upgrading outside of swapchain isnt required either since the game renders most of it in RGB11_float or RGB16_float outside of some textures like UI and such.

Addon Features

• Implemented Tonemapping to properly set peak brightness
• Diffuse white (game brightness) is controlled via Reno slider (SDR Content Brightness slider has no effect on the game)
• Separate Gamma correction for game scene and UI
• Removed the abysmal per-pixel jitter noise from all scenes
• Disabled all forms of sharpening (You can use Lilium's RCAS which I've added as an alternative)
• Bloom control with toggle between original and alt mode which has less flickering issues when in motion and doesnt look as aggressive on bright light sources
• Vignette control
• LUT Strength
• Shortfuse's Film Grain

Latest build under Snapshot or Pins over on the RenoDX server below (for questions and support Discord will be the best place)

Extra

DX11 unfortunately has worse CPU performance with large delta swings when a ton of fx is going off. As such my recommendation is to use Vulkan + reshade using the below fixes

• Use Lilium's Tonemapping shader set to your display peak (leave at default settings, just adjust the peak brightness level from the default 600nits)

• Use Lilium's Black Floor Fix to emulate Gamma 2.2 (Do note that as in-game vignette can't be disabled, Applying black floor fix in this manner might crush shadows around the edges of the scene)