8-bit Color Mode not showing in HDR mode

[Mitko69420]

Hey, my issue is a little weird. When I enable HDR mode in BetterDisplay or any other than Desktop HDR on my Alienware AW3423DWF makes the 8-bit color mode disappear. The colors look awful and I've been playing for hours and can't fix this. Any help?

[Mitko69420]

Also I'm on M4 Mac mini and connected by USB-C to DP that came with the monitor, which worked fine in native res 165Hz 8-bit with dithering on my Windows PC

[waydabber]

HDR normally requires 10-bit to properly show the HDR dynamic range. The problem (why it might look bad) is not the lack of 8-bit mode but the 4:2:2 chroma subsampling (meaning the color resolution is halved). You might want to try lowering the refresh rate to allow RGB or YCbCr 4:4:4.

[marcebdev]

@waydabber there's a thread here with much more info. Similar to the post though I can confirm as well that on Windows this monitor works with 165hz, HDR with 8bit full rgb color. Any ideas on how to figure this out?

#3716

[waydabber]

Yes, technically HDR could work with 8-bit, but might introduce banding (GPU side dithering can help with that though). I am not sure this can be fixed as modes that are not parsed by the DCP as viable won't be available on macOS. You can check available connection modes using cli if you have betterdisplaycli installed.

betterdisplaycli get -connectionModeList

[Mitko69420]

There has to be a way to be able to select 8-bit with dithering to get Full Range RGB on 165Hz. I recently switched to my Mac from Windows and I am very confused why this isn't a simple option

[waydabber]

Yeah, this is indeed unfortunate.