NVIDIA Graphics Performance Issues with HDR Technology on 4K Monitors

The impact of HDR technology under 4K resolution has a very important impact on the performance of NVIDIA graphics and only those of AMD.

Monitors with 4K resolutions typically have native support for HDR technology, which offers improved image quality thanks to more realistic colors. This type of technology consumes additional resources and impacts hardware performance, which is to be expected. However, a study by Computerbase.de has shown that NVIDIA graphics cards are more negatively affected than AMD cards.

NVIDIA suffers more with HDR on 4K monitors than AMD.

This comparison has been made with an RX Vega 64 from AMD and a GTX 1080 from NVIDIA. AMD's solution has a very small performance penalty of just 2%, while in NVIDIA this difference goes to 10%, when moving from SDR to HDR technology.

It has not been possible to determine what the problem is with this performance jump, but it is not ruled out that it has to do with the optimization of the graphics drivers. It is also postulated that the problem could be caused by how NVIDIA graphics process 4K RGB images by compressing color with YCbCr 4: 2: 2 chroma reduction under HDR. This amount of additional work would have a strong performance impact by having to reduce the rendering of the frames.

It can be seen as Mass Effect Andromeda, a game supported by NVIDIA and widely used for marketing, barely shows a difference in performance. The opposite case is Destiny 2, where AMD graphics suffer greatly, dropping in performance by up to 20%. We don't expect NVIDIA to give explanations, as always, since once you buy their products, if I've seen you, I don't remember.