[BUG] HDR breaks the 2D Tutorial starting from Chapter 4

[dmonkman]

At the end of Tutorial 4, I was getting a black window instead of Colors.CornflowerBlue as expected. After further investigation, I found that modifying the graphics settings (Graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth, Graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight or Graphics.IsFullScreen) with HDR enabled on my display is what causes the black window output. If I do not modify any of these settings (in other words, I comment out these three lines in the tutorial), the code seems to work even with HDR enabled. This bug also prevented content from being displayed in Tutorial 5. This seems like a major hinderance to new developers as there are no exceptions thrown, no console outputs to help them debug, and no discussions of this specific issue that I could find in the community.

Display information

DELL G3223Q
Display 1: Connected to AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

Desktop mode: 3840 × 2160, 144 Hz
Active signal mode: 3840 × 2160, 144 Hz
Bit depth: 10-bit
Color format: RGB
Color space: High dynamic range (HDR)
HDR certification: Not found
Peak brightness: 530 nits

Device specifications

Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 8-Core Processor @ 3.40 GHz
Installed RAM: 32.0 GB
System type: 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Windows specifications

Edition: Windows 11 Pro
Version: 22H2
Installed on: 2023-08-10
OS build: 22621.4317
Experience: Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.22700.1041.0

Possible Solutions

1. Add a warning to Tutorial 4 informing users that HDR can break the expected window output in the 2D Tutorial. The code works properly if I disable HDR for my display:

Windows: System > Display > Use HDR > Off

2. Add code that ensures (more) compatibility with HDR displays.

Images

Width and height are changed from defaults (HDR enabled) -> Larger black window

Width and height are commented out (HDR enabled) -> Smaller properly colored window

Width and height are changed from defaults (HDR disabled) -> Larger properly colored window

[dellis1972]

@AristurtleDev any thoughts on this?

[AristurtleDev]

@dellis1972

(deleted my previous comment, realized i do have an HDR monitor 😅)

Just tested chapter 04 with the code from the sample repository and it's working with no issue. Not sure exactly what may be causing this for @dmonkman and their display.

The code itself is just the standard boilerplate code that any MonoGame project would use to change the backbuffer width/height and then apply it. It's not doing anything special.

The only thing I can possible think of would be the GraphicsProfile value. By default, it's on Reach.

@dmonkman you could try the following. On the line before Graphics.Apply() add the following

// Switch to HiDef profile
Graphics.GraphicsProfile = GraphicsProfile.HiDef;

Though even if this resolves it @dellis1972, i'm not sure this would be a bug with the tutorial itself since it's just doing the standard MonoGame things. This might need to be something investigated further in the MonoGame repo as an issue there.