Thirith on 12/2/2024 at 10:13

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One thing to note is that none of these games have native HDR support (to the best of my knowledge; not 100% sure with The Dark Mod). Windows 10/11 offers auto HDR, but that's not the same as actual HDR support that's done individually for each game that offers it. I don't think Windows offers much in the way of settings for auto HDR, and the settings for your screen would depend a lot on what brand/model you're using.

morgan on 13/2/2024 at 11:04

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Set the game up in Special K Just download here (https://www.special-k.info) read this post here (https://wiki.special-k.info/en/HDR/Retrofit) on how to use it (All 3 games look great in HDR on my HDR monitor with Special K)

Darkness_Falls on 21/2/2024 at 00:24

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I've never heard of SpecialK, but would the "Windows HDR Calibration" app published by Microsoft Corp help calibrate for 2D HDR? Or is it just for 3D gaming. I'm not sure... but may be worth looking into, as well

Good call on going OLED for Thief, though, assuming it does good with black pixels and dark areas. In a good OLED monitor, I think individual pixels can actually turn off when they need to display black. Infinite blacks, I think it's called? Either way, individual pixels only illuminate wherever they're needed in a good OLED monitor, too... rather than entire regions of the monitor or the whole screen sometimes.

On the other hand, I cannot recommend a Samsung Odyssey G7 28" 4K monitor for Thief at all, which is IPS (LCD?), I believe. I saw someone playing Thief / Black Parade on it, and it was pretty bad. If there were no light sources in your view, it actually looked pretty good (nice dark shadows and dark areas). But as soon as a bright torch, bright stained glass window, or lamp entered your view, even by just a few pixels, the ENTIRE screen brightened, became awash, with that annoying luminescent grey inherent with LCD monitors ("raised black," it might be called?), which is not at all conducive to Thief gaming. So as you moved and looked around, the screen would jarringly go from nice dark areas with nice contrasts and quickly flicker to luminous grey across the entire screen, and then back to nice darks. (Even if there were only 20 bright pixels on the far-right of the screen, the rest of your screen would become awash in raised blacks.) Part of this was due to some "auto contrast" type of setting in the monitor, but even if you disabled that, the whole screen would then just permanently get the luminous grey raised blacks with no controls whatsoever to make shadows or black areas actually lose their LCD luminance. In other words, if you disabled the "auto contrast" it just permanently went into some type of "raised black" mode that you couldn't fix by manually adjusting Contrast, Brightness, etc. There was just no way to achieve the deep black that the "Auto Contrast" setting was able to do. The monitor, in general, also flickered a lot when just browsing web pages.

LG UltraGear 27" OLED for Thief is much more impressive, imo. The HDR is probably not as bright(?) as the Odyssey G7 and it is 1440p not 4K, but honestly, it looks quite good. I've heard the color accuracy is also better in the LG UltraGear. It flickers a little bit on web pages sometimes when scrolling or whatever, and for YouTube videos where "ambient mode" is auto-enabled on every video these days that is pretty annoying with the glowing pixels around the exterior of videos unless you disable the setting in YouTube, but the flickers are still not nearly as jarring or frequent as the Odyssey G7's.
Disclaimer: Only seen 5 or 10 mins of Thief gameplay on it. But it seemed nice once settings were good, which included a couple NVidia Control Panel Brightness and Gamma tweaks.

I think a step up from the Odyssey G7 on the Samsung side is the Odyssey Neo G8 which is some sort of LED tech (OLED?), so it might actually work better for Thief (I'm not sure), but it is larger (32") and so not too conducive to sitting on a desk a couple feet from your face, imo. (Though, I've personally never tried such a large monitor. I just know that my small desk that is not very deep, so I think it would not be good for me at least.)

All these options seem very expensive to me, but wanted to share some recent observations in case prices come down someday, techs improve, or Thief gaming with dark shadows is important to the player reading this (i.e., cost/benefit analysis)

Darkness_Falls on 21/2/2024 at 06:22

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Congratulations Svperstar! I bet that's a great monitor :D

FenPhoenix on 25/2/2024 at 21:31

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I don't have an HDR capable monitor so I can't test that specifically, but I tried Special K itself and was able to get the in-game overlay to show up in Thief 2 with an FM loaded:

-Open Special K and add Thief 2
-Click the "compact" button or whatever it's called in the top-right of the title bar
-Uncheck the "Stop automatically" check box
-Click the "Service" button so the green text says "Running"
-Start AngelLoader and run an FM. The overlay shows up in-game signifying that Special K is working (I guess)

Are your Thief executables in AngelLoader the same ones as in Special K? Do you have multiple installs?