HDR games render into a signal container that tops out at 10,000 nits, and no consumer panel gets close to reproducing all of it. Somewhere between the game engine and your eyes, the brightness range gets compressed — and who does that compressing decides whether the sun reads as a textured ball of fire or a flat white disc. When the game, the console, and the TV each compress the same signal independently, highlights blow out and shadows crush, and the player ends up blaming HDR itself. The HDR Gaming Interest Group (HGiG) was formed to divide that job exactly once, and every current platform ships the calibration screens that make it work. Here is what those sliders are actually asking, why the “HGIG” setting on your TV is not quite what the group defined, and how to fix blown highlights for good.
What this covers: What tone mapping does to an HDR game, why HGiG exists, and how to run the calibration flows on Windows 11, PS5, and Xbox correctly. Why it matters: Calibrating your console while the TV’s dynamic tone mapping is engaged teaches it a false peak-brightness figure — and every game you launch afterward inherits the error. Who should care: Anyone gaming on an HDR TV or monitor who has either never run the platform calibration, or ran it with the wrong picture mode active.
What tone mapping does to your game
HDR10 games render against the PQ transfer function defined in BT.2100, a curve that codes luminance up to 10,000 nits. The HGiG guidelines describe the problem bluntly: “HDR displays cannot yet reproduce the full extent of luminance and color as specified in BT2100 PQ. Also, e.g., games using physical based rendering (PBR), render into an unconstrained linear space that exceeds BT2100 PQ. For example, a sun could be rendered much brighter than 10,000 nits.” So every display compresses the incoming signal down to its own panel limits — HGiG calls this “display mapping,” and notes that each manufacturer handles it differently.
Movies survive this because the file carries mastering metadata that tells the TV how bright the master is. Console games don’t. As HDTVTest puts it, when playing HDR games “the PS5 doesn’t send this HDR mastering information to the TV at all,” so the TV is mapping blind. That is why consoles make you measure the panel yourself with on-screen sliders instead.
There are two ways a display can do that mapping, and they define this entire topic:
- Hard clipping follows the PQ curve faithfully up to the panel’s real limit and cuts everything above it. HDTVTest describes LG’s HGiG implementation this way: the TV “is going to be disabling all the tone mapping and it is going to follow the PQ EOTF curve up to maybe close to its peak brightness capability and it is going to hard clip.”
- Dynamic tone mapping (DTM) analyzes each frame and remaps brightness on the fly — “basing its decision to tone map on analysis of the histogram on screen,” in HDTVTest’s wording. What Hi-Fi? summarizes the visible result: DTM “tends to flatten and blur bright elements, over-exposing them and removing detail,” while also lifting black levels that wash out the image.
The failure mode is stacking both. HDTVTest demonstrated this on an LG CX OLED: with HGiG engaged, the console calibration pattern disappeared at 10 clicks — 800 nits on a reference monitor. With the TV’s own tone mapping left active, the same pattern needed 50 clicks, about 3,600 nits, because LG’s game-mode curve tries to resolve 4,000-nit highlights when no metadata is present. The console would then push 3,600-nit highlights at a panel whose real peak measures roughly 650–700 nits, and the TV compresses everything a second time — a mapping you never calibrated, applied on top of the one you did.
Why HGiG exists — and why “HGIG mode” is a strange name
The group formed in August 2018 as a volunteer effort organized by Microsoft and Sony, with LG Electronics and VIZIO named alongside them in the founding announcement. Its guidelines — drafted August 16, 2018 and updated to version 1.1 on July 11, 2019 — are best practices, not a certification. What Hi-Fi? reports the membership later broadened to TV makers Samsung and Panasonic and to publishers including Activision, EA, Rockstar, and Ubisoft.
The core recommendation, quoted from the guidelines: “produce an HDR game that parameterizes its tone mapper when given information about an HDR display’s tone mapper. This will compensate for the variance in how displays handle HDR.” Three parties cooperate: displays report the luminance range in which they preserve detail; consoles store that data, expose it to games through an API, and offer a system calibration that can override it; games then render gameplay-critical objects — an enemy silhouetted against blinding light, the corner exit of a tunnel — inside the range the display can actually show.
That range is defined by three numbers, and every calibration screen you have ever seen is asking for them:
| Parameter | HGiG definition | What the slider sets |
|---|---|---|
| MinTML | Minimum luminance preserving dark detail (10% of screen area) | Black point — the floor below which shadow detail is lost |
| MaxFFTML | Max luminance preserving bright detail across 100% of the frame | Full-screen peak — how bright large bright areas get before clipping |
| MaxTML | Max luminance preserving bright detail in 10% of the frame | Highlight peak — how bright small speculars (sun, lamps, muzzle flashes) get |
The Primary HDR range runs from MinTML to MaxFFTML; the Extended HDR range extends to MaxTML for small-area highlights. When a console cannot identify the display at all, the guidelines’ default values are MaxFFTML 600 nits, MaxTML 1,000 nits, and MinTML 0.1 nits. For displays that report only a category:
| HGiG display category | MinTML | MaxTML | MaxFFTML (all categories) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category 1 | 0.1 nits | 600 nits | 600 nits |
| Category 2 | 0.1 nits | 1,000 nits | 600 nits |
| Category 3 | 0.1 nits | 4,000 nits | 600 nits |
| Category 4 | 0 nits | 10,000 nits | 600 nits |
Now the wrinkle in the name. On July 16, 2020, the group’s organizers published a notice stating that “‘HGIG Mode’ is not a product function defined in the HGIG guidelines,” that HGIG is not a standardization body, and that it runs no certification program — the FAQ further notes that “HGIG” is a registered trademark of Sony Interactive Entertainment. TV makers shipped settings named HGiG anyway. LG’s implementation lives under Game Optimizer as Tone Mapping Compensation, is available only over HDMI with Game Optimizer active, and in LG’s own words compensates the picture “to meet the intention of the game creator” — with the honest warning that “when [HGIG] is selected, the screen may look darker than in the case when Tone Mapping [ON] is selected.” What Hi-Fi? reports Samsung added an HGiG option to 2020 QLEDs such as the Q90T through an October 2020 firmware update. So “HGIG” on your TV is a manufacturer’s implementation of the guideline’s intent — disable TV-side mapping, hand the job to the game — not a certified mode the group ever defined.
The one rule every calibration screen shares
The HGiG guidelines state the procedure in a single line: “Adjust slider until gray squares just disappear.” That is hard clipping, and it is the correct target at the bright end. Stopping at “barely visible” under-reports your panel: HDTVTest measured the PS5’s adjustment steps as more than 100 nits apart around the 1,000-nit mark (roughly 980 nits at 15 clicks versus 850 at 14), so settling one step early caps every highlight in every compliant game below what the panel can actually show.
At the dark end, the same source recommends the minimum value: zero nits preserves true black — the whole point of a per-pixel-emitting OLED panel, whose subpixel layouts and aging quirks we cover separately — and raising the black floor risks floating blacks and near-black flicker. The minimum slider exists for bright rooms, where some shadow lift can help visibility; in a dark room it is pure loss.
The caveat that decides everything: this only works if the TV displays the test pattern faithfully. Dynamic tone mapping moves the clipping point while you calibrate — you are measuring a moving target — so HDTVTest’s advice is unambiguous: engage HGiG (or fully disable tone mapping) on the TV first, then calibrate the console. If your TV cannot disable it — HDTVTest notes recent Sony Bravia models tone map at all times with no true HGiG bypass — do not trust the pattern at all: set both bright screens to 1,000 nits (15 clicks from the bottom on PS5) as a baseline, or 1,500 nits on brighter flagship mini-LED sets.
Where the sliders live on each platform
| Platform | Entry point | What it asks | Gotchas |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows 11 | Windows HDR Calibration app (Microsoft Store) | Three HGiG-recommended patterns: darkest visible detail, brightest visible detail, maximum brightness | Windows 11 only; needs WDDM 2.7 or later drivers and an AMD RX 400-series GPUGPU. Graphics Processing Unit — the chip that renders the game's visuals; the main driver of framerate and image quality., Intel 11th-gen integrated graphics (or DG1), or NVIDIA GTX 10-series or newer; must run full screen |
| PlayStation 5 | Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output > Adjust HDR | Full-frame peak, small-window peak, black point | Set HDR to Always On and non-HDR titles convert to HDR output; On When Supported leaves them in SDR |
| Xbox Series X/S | Profile & System > Settings > General > TV & display options > Calibrate HDR for games | Same checkerboard-disappear task, per HDTVTest’s walkthrough | Put the TV in Game mode first, and re-run the app whenever you change TVs or adjust TV picture settings |
On Windows the app arrived in September 2022, and Microsoft’s instructions mirror the console flow: “drag the slider until the test pattern is no longer visible on each screen,” run it in your normal lighting conditions, and be aware that post-processing effects enabled in the monitor’s OSD can throw it off. The resulting profile is display-specific — Microsoft says to run the app again whenever your display setup changes, and the profiles it creates are removable through Color Management in Control Panel.
The PC pipeline itself also differs from the console one. Microsoft documents that on Windows, “tone mapping occurs on the GPU, using color information retrieved from the monitor, prior to compositing the final desktop image,” and that no additional content-based tone mapping is expected from the monitor in either DisplayHDR or Dolby Vision mode. One practical consequence: Microsoft acknowledges some monitors cap max brightness around 450 nits in their certified modes, with a non-certified HDR10 option in the OSD unlocking up to 1,000 nits — a deliberate trade of certification accuracy for brightness that Windows lets you make by disabling Dolby Vision mode under Settings > System > Display > HDR.
What your display’s real peak actually is
The number on the box is a floor, not a measurement. VESA’s DisplayHDR certification defines the minimum peak luminance each tier must hit — 400, 500, 600, 1,000, or 1,400 cd/m² for LCD tiers, with the same five levels in the True Black specification for OLED — and every tier requires support of the HDR10 format. The entry rungs are modest: DisplayHDR 400 requires only 90% DCI-P3 coverage and permits a 1,300:1 contrast ratio with a 0.4 cd/m² black floor, while DisplayHDR 1000 demands 95% coverage and a 30,000:1 ratio. VESA itself warns that a monitor advertising pseudo-specs like “HDR-400” instead of “DisplayHDR 400” likely does not meet the certification requirements at all. That ladder is the same one our OLED vs Mini-LED vs IPS: The 2026 Refresh Rate Cliff buyer’s guide uses to sort panel classes — and it is why an edge-lit HDR400 badge is not a highlight-performance promise.
Measured reality differs from the badge in both directions. TechRadar measures TV peak brightness on a 100 IRE pattern covering 10% of the screen, and notes the 2% window figure “is usually what is used by manufacturers for their brightness claims” — smaller windows read brighter. The same piece notes that HDR movies are commonly mastered for home release at a maximum brightness of 1,000 nits, which is why a display that genuinely reaches 1,000 nits needs no aggressive mapping for film content. For games, HDTVTest’s advice is to look up your specific TV’s measured HDR peak — RTINGS publishes measured peaks per model — and hard-clip the console’s sliders to that figure. The alternative is letting a 4,000-nit default curve and a dynamic mapper negotiate it for you, twice.
The blown-highlights checklist
| Symptom | What actually happened | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Sun is a flat white disc; cloud detail gone | Console calibrated with dynamic tone mapping on, so the stored peak is too high | Enable HGiG or disable tone mapping on the TV, then re-run the console calibration |
| HDR looks dimmer than reviews suggest | Bright slider stopped at “barely visible” instead of just-disappeared, under-reporting the panel | Push each bright slider until the pattern fully disappears, then stop |
| Blacks look gray; near-black flicker | Minimum-luminance slider raised above zero in a dark room | Set the black-point slider to the minimum (0 nits) unless the room is bright |
| HDR looked right on the old TV, wrong on the new one | Calibration profiles are per-display and went stale after the hardware swap | Re-run the console app or the Windows app after any display change |
| Monitor never gets bright in HDR | Monitor caps around 450 nits in Dolby Vision/DisplayHDR mode | Disable Dolby Vision mode in Settings > System > Display > HDR to reach the non-certified HDR10 mode |
| Changing console sliders does nothing in one specific game | Only some titles consume console-level metadata — HDTVTest’s early examples on Xbox were DiRT 5 and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War | Use that game’s own in-game HDR calibration, with HGiG engaged on the TV |
| HGiG mode looks “too dark” | PQ accuracy sitting next to a brightened DTM picture, not a fault | LG suggests comparing Tone Mapping On and Off for comfort — but expect HGiG to look dimmer and render highlights correctly |
Next read
- For the panel behind the black point — how QD-OLED and WOLED subpixel layouts differ and age — see OLED Gaming Panels: Subpixel Layouts & Burn-in Care Guide.
- For the latency side of the same display chain, see Frame Generation Latency: Reflex vs Anti-Lag 2 Frame Pacing.
- For the refresh-rate standards that sit alongside HDR in the same HDMI 2.1 handshake, see G-Sync vs FreeSync vs HDMI 2.1: What VRR Tier Sets.