Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (PC) HDR Analysis #90

KoKlusz · 2025-11-26T18:31:45Z

KoKlusz
Nov 26, 2025
Maintainer

Technical Info:

4A Engine
HDR only available in the fullscreen windowed mode ⛔ (check out this video for a fix)
Uncapped peak brightness ⛔
Gamma mismatch ⛔

To fix it, you need SDR Gamma emulation via Lilium's black floor fix. If you don't know how to reshade, click on the video below:

HDR Settings:

So this is a weird one. In game, there are no HDR settings except for the on/off toggle, however there are a few settings hidden in the config file located in %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\metro exodus\. But after testing them, it appears that only r_hdr_white_paper
cvar seems to do anything, that is, it controls the scene brightness/paper white of both the game and the UI.

Another PC specific tweak is the -deependark launch command that disables some color grading that causes raised and milky shadows in the game. However, the downside is that it can produce some shadow clipping and expose a blue tint in the shadows, similar to the last two Resident Evil games. So I guess you gotta pick your poison.

Review:

The implementation is pretty rough, suffering from pretty much every issue I can think of. We have gamma mismatch on top of already lifted shadows, we have different tone mappers resulting in the color shifts, scorching bright highlights (screenshots appear capped to 2000 nits, this is because I've used photo mode to capture them, actual game is fully uncapped), and aggressive auto exposure. It can look okay-ish with some tweaks, but there's a lot of room for improvement.

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)