Does anyone know how to get HDR certification working again?

B

Bavanity

Member
Joined
Jul 16, 2022
Messages
141
Hi, my laptop (GT77 13VI, Mini LED 144hz 4K) is definitely VESA HDR certified and absolutely is on the official VESA HDR certification list also.
It shows not HDR certified, but the display shows as a standard pnp display in device manager with a Microsoft 2006 driver and I think this has to be the issue, as those with other laptops or monitors that are supposed to be HDR certified have fixed it with a simple driver.

Unfortunately, on the GT77 drivers page, MSI does not provide any kind of monitor driver despite having a driver for everything else imaginable.

I think this also has to do with why I had such a problem getting Netflix to show HDR and 4K compatible after a fresh install (cause I didn't want Norton bloatware crap on my PC and wanted a fresh install, or was it McAfee? Definitely one of the two, plus other bloat nonsense).

Eventually after installing Nvidia drivers and Steam of all things and all the codecs in Microsoft Store, Netflix now plays HDR and/or 4K. The monitor of course does show up as HDR gaming and video streaming compatible and I can USE HDR, but the experience is non optimal for a HDR 1000 nit display, as I can't get it quite right with manual calibration and the brightness is weird in videos, and I need to actually turn the windows HDR brightness slider to the LEFT, which I have never understood as it's supposed to be brighter on the right (0 on left 100 on right), but that doesn't look as clean. But about 50% is where I settle if I want HDR without it being too dark. Yes, otherwise, turning OFF HDR and watching Netflix in standard 4K is actually brighter than HDR mode!

A HDR certified driver does all this stuff automatically afaik, i.e. is pre calibrated. Remember, True Color doesn't work in HDR mode so it's all up to Windows and the HDR certified driver, which just does not seem to exist to download for the GT77, and Windows update is no help either.

The problem I have is that on day one I converted the 2x2TB raid 0 drives into two 2TB indie drives (so much better, no one needs raid 0 on Gen 4 SSDs except for maybe the absolute most extreme, highest resolution video editing, and I am a gamer and music composer). By doing this, i instantly wiped the MSI factory restore, it just got auto deleted, so I can only do fresh installs with a Windows USB ISO installer.

That doesn't change the fact that I can't find a driver for the panel anywhere nor even know what panel it actually is (i.e. make and model) and MSI should absolutely provide this on their driver page.

I hate to think that the only solution is to turn it into a raid 0, 4TB drive again, and ask MSI to provide me with the factory image so I can factory restore it - as they already told me the image won't work on a standard non raid drive.
The other thing is that the RAID mode and factory image auto installs Intel's useless and pointless Storage manager app, which breaks windows restore and is non removable once installed, and I hated not having access to Windows restore in the default factory image mode.

I have confirmed the Intel app breaks system restore by trying it in this 2 individual non raid ssd mode, and I ended up reinstalling Windows lol as it instantly stopped system restore from working.

This could be such a simple thing to fix with a simple inf driver, but I know that trying to say that to MSI "support" will be a veritable nightmare and there's no possible way I will be able to get my point across. I tried their support before for something else and it was pointless - like talking to an AI who could not understand what I was asking.

My laptop warranty expires on June 25th 2025 so any ideas before I go down the awful road of having them do a factory image restore? Heck, MSI don't even PROVIDE factory images for download so I can try this myself, this is how behind the times they are.

Any ideas, any help whatsoever appreciated. Any idea no matter how small or large, please do share.

TIA, peace, and have a great day.
MSI forum.png
 
Last edited:
Abel Lopez said:
It is not a big deal, just check on the VESA website to see if your model is on the list or not.
The word on the system would not affect any performance or display issue.
Why does the HDR certification not found on Windows ?
Click to expand...
Hi, it's on the list as I said in my post.
If I do a factory install it will show as HDR certified and won't need that calibration tool.
But I don't have access to MSI factory image as I explained and my C drive is down to 92% health and D drive 99%, so I wouldn't like to re raid the two SSD's now anyway since the wearing is so apart.
Why did I do it? because 7000 read and write is no different for gameplay than 10700 read and write (what the drives got in the default raid 0 mode) and individual drives can be swapped/replaced, as well as if one fails you don't lose the whole 4tb of data.

SSD raid 0 for a gaming laptop is an extremely stupid thing and I don't know why Alienware, MSI and Asus seem to love it so much and even force it on us in many cases.
It's been proven time and time again. A gen 3, 3500 mb/s drive starts games and loads saves at nearly identical speed to the fastest Gen 4 drive, and a SATA SSD that maxes out at 600 mb/s is only like 5% behind in loading times. Fact that has endless real time video tests showing this. So besides ultra pro video creators doing 8K or higher content and needing to be able to edit that in real time, exactly what benefit does this raid 0 have for gaming laptops when all it does is risk your data? I don't get MSI sometimes.

Not only that, on the GT77 you can't even DISABLE the raid driver so you can't use standard windows AHCI mode at all, so you need an F6 driver just to see the drives to install Windows. There is no way around it.

Anyway, that has gotten way off topic, but I can give you some more examples re screen.

That pic I showed above sometimes says 1023 nits, sometimes 873, it doesn't know what it wants.

This is the entire point of a monitor driver, to correctly load the HDR calibration preset when in HDR mode, since True Colour doesn't work in that mode anyway.

I have searched the web and spent so many hours on trying to understand Windows HDR calibration and sliders that I have given up, as no one seems to know anything more than myself after hours of viewing content on the most popular channels. For example, not one person properly explains what the Windows auto video processing options does, what the HDR so called brightness slider is really designed to do and how it actually works, or when to use auto HDR in games and when and how to best calibrate. It's a cluster F mine field of no knowledge LOL.

I just wanted to simplify my life and hopefully with the driver installed, have a more well balanced "jack of all trades" HDR experience, as right now it's not great at all. In fact as I said, content in SDR is brighter and HDR scenes too dark in streaming. There's no calinbration without the certified driver, so that's why I think it matters.

To put it another way, how can a 19 year old plug and play monitor windows generic driver be the right thing to use for a 2023 mini led HDR panel? That panel tech didn't even exist back then.

I do appreciate the reply trying to ease my mind, thank you.
 
PS I think I know why these gaming laptops do it. To brag for raw burst read and write drive figures, even though it means nothing.

I just put an Alienware Area 51 18" 5090 in my cart, and it will only let me select 1TB, 2TB or 2x2Tb in Raid. In the US, you can choose individual drives, but not in Australia!

So if I buy it, I might just buy a 2TB this time and buy a 4TB for the second slot and open it and just add that, so I can always restore the factory image if needed to the main 2Tb drive.

Look, I won't deviate from a factory image again. I learned my lesson, TWICE lol.

Clean installs and no bloat is lovely, but it's only ever caused me problems. In 2022 I had a Lenovo Legion 7i/11800h/3070 16" laptop. The factory image will only work with a single 1TB drive in the PC.
But if you do a clean install the way I had it (1TB +2Tb in spare), Lenovo don't provide the dolby vision driver or power profiles drivers. So you could never, ever get them back. Someone finally made a workaround with a bat install script and he ripped the power profiles off a factory install and provied them to us for download, so that worked, but no one could ever enable dolby vision, and downloading it from microsoft store doesn't work and you can't even buy a license. It has to be pre installed with the factory image for some reason. After 50 emails to Lenovo and them realising indeed there was no way to download a "dolby vision enabler" with a normal clean install, and that only a factory image restore could do it, I was over it. Dolby vision makes such a difference on non HDR laptops that support it, it makes Netflix tolerable and removes all those horrible pixelated compression artifacts in dark scenes. So I opened the laptop, removed the second SSD, reinstalled the factory image, reinstalled the second SSD and just dealt with it so I could have Dolby Vision.

Now that I have had similar/sort of related issues with MSI, never ever again no matter what I buy, even if it has a ton of bloat. I will always use factory image and just use Revo uninstaller to uninstall the bloat as soon as the OS first opens and leave it at that. It's just not worth mucking about with it otherwise.

I checked the driver page of their newer laptops and MSI just don't provide monitor drivers to this day, so they are embedded in the factory install.

Of course, someone, anyone with a 2023 GT77 that IS using a factory image could zip up the inf file and send it to me, but I've not found one single person thus far.

(if you are a GT77 user and have the name of the panel correctly identified in Device manager, rather than "generic display", please, PLEASE, I'll even send you a $20 donation over paypal if you send me the monitor inf files. I can tell you how to find them and how easy it is if you don't know how).

Peace.
 
Back
Top