Imagine a gradient bar of red, green, or blue on a display. The latest displays show so many colors that the 256 shades in an 8-bits channel will show banding.
Banding is horrible for photo/video editing hence 10 bit displays that can show 1024 shades in a single channel which is more shades than our eyes can see.
HDR in gaming also uses 10-bit per channel, but it's often a gimmick with current cheap gaming displays and might show banding even if there are technically 10-bits. OLED gaming monitors should be able to display 10-bit accurately though.
Well considering pretty much every modern game engine supports HDR and HDR has been a standard feature in AAA games for at least a decade I seriously doubt they're going to drop it 10 years from now. The only way it gets removed is if something better comes along and makes HDR obsolete.
The trend still goes towards HDR, since it’s not just an effect in games. Nearly any modern TV can decode HDR metadata and most streaming services support HDR. Of course, entry level TVs and monitors cannot take advantage of HDR as much but as better TVs get cheaper that’ll spread even more. My TV isn’t particularly amazing but the difference between HDR content and SDR content is clear. If I have a choice, I never watch the SDR version.
HDR isn’t just an effect like bloom. It’s a way of using the capabilities of modern TVs in a way SDR can’t. HDR is made for taking advantage of OLED, quantum dots, high contrast, local dimming, higher colour gamuts and/or the high brightness consumer screens reach nowadays.
So if you wanna bet, I‘d personally bet on HDR being more like the standard in 10 years because screen tech usually only gets better and HDR is the software/firmware implementation to take advantage of those hardware improvements.
Exactly. Even though there'll absolutely still be displays that won't really do HDR, they'll soon enough be able to handle that as input signal and then just map it down to their gamuts. Just like 6bit displays still take 8bit input etc. "HDR" will just become the standard colour format and displays will map it with varying degrees of accuracy. (Many already do this.)
Whelp, gnome doesn't even support hdr yet, but kde added preliminary support just recently. Also, nvidia added supports for hdr just recently with their v550 driver, released just last month. You probably can run hdr games today if you're willing to put some elbow grease. I'm lazy though, so I'll just wait.
You know, the room inside your monitor full of little hamsters with tiny paintbrushes that speed paint everything onto the screen from the inside. They used to have a lot more room, but we had to breed the hamsters way smaller.
