I had thought that Obduction (1.8.1) was a gorgeous game in its standard, non-HDR format, but the game is so much better looking in HDR that I'm amazed. There's no comparison--going back to standard display now looks downright shabby...;) For me, HDR changes the entire experience.

My hardware/OS:

Windows10x64 v1903, build 18362.10005
19.8.1 Adrenalins
AMD 50th Anniversary 5700XT
Aorus Master x570 UEFI bios F5l (1003ABB)
Corsair HX-850 PSU (72a x1 12v rail)
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X @ 3.8Ghz default clock, 4.4+GHz boost
RAM 16GB 2x8GB, Patriot Viper Elite PV416G320C6K @3200mhz 16 16 16 36 1T
LG MultiDrive DVD writer SATA
Boot: Samsung 960 EVO NVMe 250GB (UEFI boot partition)
2x 1TB WD Blue 7200 rpm S3
ST2000DM S3 2TB
ST4000DM004 S3 4TB
BenQ EW-3270U 4k, HDR monitor

That's really cool as there aren't - so much I know- many games benefitting from HDR Support like on PS4 or YT Videos on my Galaxy S8. I was looking for a new monitor lately and waned to have HDR Support, but at the time 3D Vision was yet a thing and I bought a 3D Vision Monitor... now fuc...
LAst week I read about HDR Monitors for PC again and I learned that the real thing (around 1000 nits) starting about 1000 and more $. Some "HDR" Monitors aren't real HDR Monitors. What about your Monitor ?
How much ist it and how many nits ?

$449 on sale via Amazon...and about "nits"...everyone I've talked to says that 1000nits creates areas of screen so bright that they constantly have to keep turning the brightness *way* down. Basically, it's people who have little experience with 1000nits who keep recommending it, it seems--sort of an echo chamber, I gather--one repeating the other, etc. Mainly, however, I think HDR in all its forms is not yet ready for prime time.

The BenQ is an excellent monitor and it's a big winner at the current sale price--lots of reviews on it available via Bing/Google. I treat the HDR 10 support like a bit of icing--it's very nice in the occasional game that offers a good implementation of HDR--most HDR games don't as of yet--but its HDR capability was not the main reason I bought it.

Obduction's HDR, imo, is better than any other game's I've seen to date, which is the intent of my OP.

Ok, that is interesting.
I looked it up now and it says HDR10, but 8bit Color, so it just emulates HDR.
Did you play other HDR games and/or with PS4/XBone ? Did you watch a HDR Movie ?

Because, when the PS4Pro came out everybody talked about 4K, but some people said that the killer feature isn't 4k, rather it is HDR- and the icing is, that it's (theoretically) also possible with base PS4....
I don't know if you can use HDR with base PS4 and a HDR Monitor in 1080p.
For me it is a huge difference i.e. in Gran Turismo Sport !
I saw videos of gameplay on my HDR capable mobile and in a retailer in was REALLY DRASTIC difference.
For me it's more important than 4k....

I hear that previously there was a HDR option in Obduction but no longer.
It is possible to turn HDR on in Windows before starting the game and set Obduction to Borderless Windowed. The TV still reports HDR on but it is possible that Windows is just mapping SDR to HDR like it does to the desktop or any other SDR app.
On games like Gears 5 a HDR calibrartion appears when you enable HDR in Windows first but not Obduction.
So is there any evidence that Obduction understands HDR ?

Actually, the monitor has an HDR emulation mode, and an HDR 10 mode--separate modes entirely. The emulation mode is strictly for non-HDR content. I'm not sure what you mean by eight-bits, though....;) The monitor itself is a native 10-bit panel (non dithered--not 8 dithered to 10, which was a requirement for me)--GPU is 10-bits, too. But the HDR 10 mode is certainly at the bottom of the HDR list--but I have to have 4k and mainly @ 32" I've got .18 pixel pitch--separate pixels are not visible--which I always look for. It's cool--HDR is in it's infancy in terms of the PC. Also, as far as the reviews go, it was hard to find one written recently, and all of them I read were written in '18 shortly after the monitor first shipped--but mine was manufacturered April 2019, and is installed with firmware which corrects what some of those early reviewers saw--the HDR is much better than their descriptions, I'm glad to report. I compute on this monitor--watchTV/movies on a 60" television...so many games, not enough time....;) Yep, monitor flashes "HDR Mode" when I run Obduction--normally I am in User Mode. I'll check on it more tomorrow and come back here. But, yes, when the monitor encounters HDR it shifts into HDR mode with a notice that it is doing so. If I turn HDR on in Win10, say, and then run a game which doesn't support HDR, the monitor switches to its emulated HDR mode--and says, "Emulated HDR" on screen.

Meant to add that I ran Destiny 2 tonight for the first time and although the monitor was running in User Mode, when the game loaded the monitor switched to "HDR Mode" without my having to turn on HDR in Windows. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, though, I can't turn on the in-game option for HDR unless I have already turned on HDR in Windows. It's a mixed bag for HDR, really. Still teething!.

There doesn't appear to be an in-game switch for HDR on/off in the game, and as of the 1.8.3 update to Obduction yesterday, I do not have to turn on HDR on the Win10 desktop--the game automatically switches to "HDR ON" from "User Mode" when the game launches. It's really gorgeous, although my favorite settings include lowering the in-game gamma a decent amount from the default setting--for some reason the gamma setting doesn't seem to save with the other in-game settings. So the game code is definitely speaking HDR to the monitor, otherwise the game would be running in my user mode sans HDR, even if I turned HDR on in the Win10 desktop, the game would run in "Emulated HDR Mode" if it didn't actually have any HDR code. It seems to me that I recall having to turn on HDR in the Win10 desktop before this last update to the game--as that's how I was able to switch between HDR on and off and make the comparison. No question but that the HDR rendering is superior--so I'm glad I did the comparison first! I'm happy with it.

Although there is no mention of HDR in the info for the new 1.8.3 release I can confirm I'm seeing the HDR flag come up on my TV without having to enable HDR first in Windows. There is still no HDR toggle in options - this is my only game where HDR auto enables - every other either you must enable HDR first in Windows or there is some in-game option.

In any case as the above posts say the visual quality is much improved. In fact before with HDR having to be enabled in Windows the image was quite likely not "real" HDR - just tone mapped SDR

<Edit>
Sadly on a second run the image was very washed out. The game is not saving the gamma setting - which is very sensitive and hard to adjust without a reference image with the slider - and has to be adjusted every time now.

<Edit>
Same on 1.8.4 - gamma not saved - so image looks awful on restart.
Gamma adjustment by itself isnt enough to get the image looking "punchy" like I thought it did on the first time I ran 1.8.3 It needs proper HDR & white & black level adjustments like Gears 5.
This is 1080Ti to LG OLED

Just updated again to 1.8.4 today....;) No notes, yet, but I did notice it seemed to increase the gamma brightness, creating an even further washed-out appearance, so I had to lower the gamma to darken the image to almost the max allowed by the slider to compensate. I was hoping that the update would have added a save position for the gamma level--but no such luck. Also, I had thought that switching to a mode other than fullscreen would put the game back into SDR mode, but no such luck--switch to windowed or borderless windowed and when I hit the "Apply" button it switches right back to full screen--necessary for HDR support. Must be that Cyan sees HDR as the default for the game, now.

I agree the image is quite washed out, and adjsting gamma is fiddly and is not really the cure - the image should be much more punchy than this

There is some comments on Steam https://steamcommunity.com/app/306760/discussions/0/3185654583882866461/
"Following testing after a couple reports about this in the last 48 hours, we're seeing issues with Windows handling HDR strangely in a variety of applications, too, not only in Obduction." from the dev I think - but I'm only seeing this problem in Obduction

Interesting--thanks for the link! Using Galaxy we can revert to former updates--all the way back to 1.7.2, atm, so this might be my next step just to test and compare a bit more. There is a well-known problem I read about concerning streaming HDR in Windows versus the HDR content being loaded from local disks, as in the streaming doesn't work so well reportedly--I would guess because of various streaming compressions used, etc. But of course, Obduction is not streamed...;) I can well believe that Windows developers are still struggling with HDR development!

Edit: this is funny! I followed the link and it's to my own post as OP....;) I forgot I had ever made the post....;) Thanks for the link!

You can prob count on one hand the number of people set up for HDR - so maybe we can get a beta instead of them just going to release next time

As a note, on Steam a poster tagged as [developer] has said Given that the image is washed out it looks like HDR is being flagged accidently.

Following 1.8.4.1 the display no longer swiches to HDR and the image is no longer washed out