Marvels Spider-Man 2 (PC) HDR Analysis #39

KoKlusz · 2025-08-27T12:55:52Z

KoKlusz
Aug 27, 2025
Maintainer

Technical Info:

Custom Engine
HDR available in the windowed mode ✅
Defaults to the peak brightness provided by EDID/Windows color profile, but can be overridden in game ✅
No gamma mismatch ❔

To fix this and other issues with this game's HDR implementation, use the RenoDX mod by Musa

HDR Settings:

Brightness - SDR brightness equivalent, controls the brightness of the entire range of the image, including highlights and UI
Contrast - self explanatory
HDR Max Luminance - peak brightness, in the range between 200 nits and 1500 nits (can't go below of what HDR Paper White slider is set to)
HDR Paper White - UI brightness slider, in the range from 10 to 1000 nits

Review:

The UI and behavior is very similar to the Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, it also doesn't suffer from any gamma weirdness like the last S-M two games on PC. The exception being that in HDR they seem to approximate the look of gamma 2.4 (commonly used in the movies and TV shows) instead of gamma 2.2 more typically used in the video games. Or at least, gamma 2.4 seems to be the closest match to SDR that I've found. The Last of Us does that too, so it's not impossible Insomniac copied the setup.

October 2025 Update: It seems like since the release, Nixxies has changed the gamma correction method back to the same broken one used in the previous PC ports of the Spider-Man games. Now the HDR image is somewhere in between sRGB and G2.2 during the daytime and closer to sRGB during the nighttime. See updated comparisons below.

January 2026 Update: Use RenoDX (link above) to fix the gamma issues.

Note that just like with the previous Insomniac/Nixxes ports, the only way to change the brightness of the image in HDR is to use the brightness slider, which affects the brightness of everything, including highlights and UI. So if you change the brightness value, you might wanna change Max Luminance and Paper White to compensate.

Recommended settings

Comparisons

‼️(In order to view them correctly on Windows, you must use a Chromium browser with Windows HDR enabled, and the brightness slider set to the value of 31)