Nvidia adds AI-powered SDR to HDR video enhancement to its latest drivers — RTX Video HDR now available for all RTX owners

Matthew Connatser
·2 min read
Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 Mobile.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 Mobile.

Alongside the launch of the company's brand-new RTX 4070 Ti Super GPU, Nvidia has announced RTX Video HDR. The new driver-level feature takes advantage of the Tensor cores on RTX graphics cards and allows users to see HDR colors in videos that were originally filmed in SDR, theoretically enhancing visual quality for free.

Available with Nvidia's latest 551.23 Game Ready drivers, RTX Video HDR is yet another AI-powered technology from Nvidia that seeks to make videos look better. Last year we received Video Super Resolution, which is essentially DLSS but for videos, and it seems Nvidia wasn't just making a one-off gimmick as a side-project.

Once we installed the 551.23 driver, we were able to find the RTX Video HDR feature in the Nvidia Control Panel under the "Adjust video image settings" menu; the option was simply labeled "High Dynamic Range," which is what HDR stands for. It's unfortunate that RTX Video HDR is only accessible in a very outdated program with a UI out of the Vista days — hopefully it'll make its way to the more modern GeForce Experience app, as well.

We were able to enable RTX Video HDR in both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. and saw a very noticeable difference between between normal SDR content and when RTX Video HDR was enabled. Colors in YouTube videos became brighter and less washed out — just like you would expect with HDR — and nothing looked particularly wrong. This was on an HP X27q, which isn't even a particularly high-end HDR monitor.

Considering that RTX Video HDR appears to work more or less as expected and is supported on all RTX GPUs — going all the way back to the RTX 20 series — it doesn't seem like there's any reason to not enable it if you have an HDR monitor. Though, more thorough testing might reveal any shortcomings that Nvidia's new AI feature has.

As AI hardware proliferates more and more, we can expect to see more of these sorts of features from Nvidia and other companies, such as Intel and AMD, which are both working on their own versions of Video Super Resolution. For the moment, however, Nvidia remains unchallenged in its AI-based solutions for enhancing both resolution and color for online videos.