The factory must glow — add native HDR output support
Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2026 9:13 pm
Warning: Spoilers in the screenshots
TL;DR: Add a proper HDR output path so the runtime lighting gets real dynamic range (night scenes, lamps, lava, machine glow, space). Wube describe 2.1 as including an update of their graphics and audio systems, and the game is CPU-bound with GPU headroom to spare. The runtime cost should be small and the timing is unusually good.
My belt factory, ringed by a lava moat. In SDR the lava and the dark volcanic rock get squeezed into the same limited range. With HDR the rock stays genuinely dark while the lava sits near peak brightness. And this is exactly the kind of frame the game already composites live.
I'm about 1500 hours in, and part of why I keep coming back is that I just like looking at the factory. I've read the existing HDR thread (viewtopic.php?t=100294), including the fair counterpoint that entity sprites are pre-rendered at a fixed light level, so HDR wouldn't change the sprites themselves beyond smoother gradients. Agreed, and that's not what I'm asking for. I'm making the case for the part of the frame the engine composites at runtime. Day/night, lamps, laser and flamethrower effects, lava on Vulcanus, machine glow, the sun in orbit. That's where extended dynamic range actually does something. Good HDR isn't "everything brighter". It's deep night staying dark and detailed while individual light sources genuinely pop, instead of everything clipping to the same SDR white.
Aquilo, the darkest ambient in the game, and the frame where SDR hurts most. Raise the brightness and the darks wash out, keep it low and the glows die. HDR removes exactly that tradeoff.
Why now
Wube themselves call the 2.1 work "the update of our graphics and audio systems" in FFF #444 (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-444), and the art investment is visible all over the release. A brand-new unloading bay, redesigned pumps with new models for fluid wagon loading, a redesigned oil refinery, a redesigned assembling machine, diagonal flamethrower turrets, and a visual pass on the planets themselves (full changelog 134095). Whenever the rendering pipeline is already open, that's the cheapest moment to add an HDR swapchain plus a tonemapping step on output, instead of retrofitting it later. Freshly redesigned assets deserve a display path that can show them off.
On cost
Factorio is almost always CPU/simulation-bound, and on most setups the GPU has plenty of headroom. An fp16 framebuffer plus a tonemap pass is cheap on modern hardware, so I'd expect the frame-time impact to be close to negligible. The real work is elsewhere, in doing color management correctly (UI and other SDR elements, calibration, sane defaults). That's genuine effort, but it's not a framerate problem.
Factorio currently has no deliberate HDR handling, so what happens on an HDR display is whatever the OS and compositor decide. The record of that is mixed. There was a 2024 report of broken rendering with crushed blacks and flickering tiles when HDR was enabled on early Plasma 6 (viewtopic.php?t=111820), plus long-standing Windows reports of movement flicker and multi-second black screens on alt-tab with HDR on. Some of this has likely improved as compositors matured, but that's kind of the point. Right now the game's appearance on HDR displays is defined by everyone except the game. A native HDR path would make it intentional.
Timing helps here too. The strongest objection in the old thread was that PC HDR was simply a mess, and in 2021 it was. Not anymore. Windows has mature HDR output paths, the Wayland color-management protocol has been standardized, and KDE Plasma has shipped real HDR and color management since 6.2. The OS-side infrastructure a native path would target finally exists on every platform. (I play on MacOS mostly and sometimes on Linux)
Driver-level Auto HDR and RTX HDR exist, but they work from the final SDR frame, after the compositor has already clipped the range. Those filters can guess at highlights. Native output simply has them.
Reach
This isn't niche anymore. Back in 2023 folks in the old thread already put HDR-capable PC monitors at roughly 40% of what's on sale, and that share has only grown since, with essentially every modern OLED TV and many laptops supporting it. For what it's worth, I play on an OLED, and the difference in games with a good implementation is night and day. HDR also typically brings wide color gamut along, which Factorio's palette would visibly enjoy.
A few more frames from my save, all SDR captures, so please imagine the highlights with real headroom behind them.
Metallurgic science production. Machine glow spilling onto dark volcanic ground, lava at the edges. Exactly the dark-ground, hot-highlight mix HDR is made for.
Science packs fanning out across the base on belts, lava cutting through the middle. Saturated colors and emissive terrain in one frame.
The science rainbow feeding the labs. This one is about color. A wider gamut would let these saturated pack colors breathe.
Agricultural science on Gleba's fungal terrain. A subtle ambient scene where headroom and gamut lift the mood, not just the brightness.
Kovarex loops. Uranium actually glows in the dark in this game, and extended range would let it really glow instead of just being a brighter green.
I know this isn't a quick win, and there's a real chance it's a "someday" rather than "soon". Even shipping it as an experimental, opt-in graphics setting would be great. But FFF #444 explicitly invites feedback and suggestions while the experimental is running, the graphics and audio systems are being updated right now (their words), and with 2.1 slated as possibly the last major update, a window like this won't come again. It felt worth making the case now. Thanks for reading.
TL;DR: Add a proper HDR output path so the runtime lighting gets real dynamic range (night scenes, lamps, lava, machine glow, space). Wube describe 2.1 as including an update of their graphics and audio systems, and the game is CPU-bound with GPU headroom to spare. The runtime cost should be small and the timing is unusually good.
- Factorio_2_Belts.jpg (3.55 MiB) Viewed 282 times
I'm about 1500 hours in, and part of why I keep coming back is that I just like looking at the factory. I've read the existing HDR thread (viewtopic.php?t=100294), including the fair counterpoint that entity sprites are pre-rendered at a fixed light level, so HDR wouldn't change the sprites themselves beyond smoother gradients. Agreed, and that's not what I'm asking for. I'm making the case for the part of the frame the engine composites at runtime. Day/night, lamps, laser and flamethrower effects, lava on Vulcanus, machine glow, the sun in orbit. That's where extended dynamic range actually does something. Good HDR isn't "everything brighter". It's deep night staying dark and detailed while individual light sources genuinely pop, instead of everything clipping to the same SDR white.
- Factorio_1_Aquilo Science.jpg (3.02 MiB) Viewed 282 times
Why now
Wube themselves call the 2.1 work "the update of our graphics and audio systems" in FFF #444 (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-444), and the art investment is visible all over the release. A brand-new unloading bay, redesigned pumps with new models for fluid wagon loading, a redesigned oil refinery, a redesigned assembling machine, diagonal flamethrower turrets, and a visual pass on the planets themselves (full changelog 134095). Whenever the rendering pipeline is already open, that's the cheapest moment to add an HDR swapchain plus a tonemapping step on output, instead of retrofitting it later. Freshly redesigned assets deserve a display path that can show them off.
On cost
Factorio is almost always CPU/simulation-bound, and on most setups the GPU has plenty of headroom. An fp16 framebuffer plus a tonemap pass is cheap on modern hardware, so I'd expect the frame-time impact to be close to negligible. The real work is elsewhere, in doing color management correctly (UI and other SDR elements, calibration, sane defaults). That's genuine effort, but it's not a framerate problem.
Factorio currently has no deliberate HDR handling, so what happens on an HDR display is whatever the OS and compositor decide. The record of that is mixed. There was a 2024 report of broken rendering with crushed blacks and flickering tiles when HDR was enabled on early Plasma 6 (viewtopic.php?t=111820), plus long-standing Windows reports of movement flicker and multi-second black screens on alt-tab with HDR on. Some of this has likely improved as compositors matured, but that's kind of the point. Right now the game's appearance on HDR displays is defined by everyone except the game. A native HDR path would make it intentional.
Timing helps here too. The strongest objection in the old thread was that PC HDR was simply a mess, and in 2021 it was. Not anymore. Windows has mature HDR output paths, the Wayland color-management protocol has been standardized, and KDE Plasma has shipped real HDR and color management since 6.2. The OS-side infrastructure a native path would target finally exists on every platform. (I play on MacOS mostly and sometimes on Linux)
Driver-level Auto HDR and RTX HDR exist, but they work from the final SDR frame, after the compositor has already clipped the range. Those filters can guess at highlights. Native output simply has them.
Reach
This isn't niche anymore. Back in 2023 folks in the old thread already put HDR-capable PC monitors at roughly 40% of what's on sale, and that share has only grown since, with essentially every modern OLED TV and many laptops supporting it. For what it's worth, I play on an OLED, and the difference in games with a good implementation is night and day. HDR also typically brings wide color gamut along, which Factorio's palette would visibly enjoy.
A few more frames from my save, all SDR captures, so please imagine the highlights with real headroom behind them.
- Factorio_7_Vulcanus Science.jpg (3.18 MiB) Viewed 282 times
- Factorio_4_Science Production.jpg (4.34 MiB) Viewed 282 times
- Factorio_5_Science Rainbow.jpg (3.94 MiB) Viewed 282 times
- Factorio_3_Gleba Science.jpg (3.86 MiB) Viewed 282 times
- Factorio_6_Uranium.jpg (4.2 MiB) Viewed 282 times
I know this isn't a quick win, and there's a real chance it's a "someday" rather than "soon". Even shipping it as an experimental, opt-in graphics setting would be great. But FFF #444 explicitly invites feedback and suggestions while the experimental is running, the graphics and audio systems are being updated right now (their words), and with 2.1 slated as possibly the last major update, a window like this won't come again. It felt worth making the case now. Thanks for reading.