I’ve been playing around with HDR in games such as Cuberpunk and Baldurs Gate 3. It seems when you go above 75% brightness on the screen, you’ll need to go into the HDR settings of the game and lower peak brightness to a lower value to maintain bright spot details.

To replicate, open Cyberpunk. Set the HDR peak brightness to 1000nits. Set the screen brightness anywhere from 30 to 75%. You will see you have full details in the bright areas of the cityscape. Now Set the brightness on the OLED screen above 75%, you’ll notice you lose almost all detail in the bright areas. At 100% brightness, you will need to set your game to 600nits to restore details in bright areas of the image, this means a lot less HDR detail.

Valve really need to add in a setting that allows people to cap or at least have a hard step for the screen brightness, at the point of maximum HDR fidelity.

With the deck set to Auto brightness, it basically makes all HDR peak brightness settings pointless. Even with auto brightness off, I’m still having to eyeball the point where I start to loose bright area details, not the best scenario.