I bought cyberpunk when it released, i may have even pre-ordered, i don't remember. I played about 20 minutes after the title drop, you know the one. It was buggy, and didn't really look that good to me, on my samsung 4k monitor.

I then played it again, on the same monitor, last year, and i was pleased with the gameplay, but again, i didn't find anything that remarkable about the overall graphics. the fidelity was great, especially at distance, due to 4k.

I'm 50 hours deep in literally as i type this (about to launch the game), and this time, this time it is completely different. I have an LG 2k HDR screen with "Smart HDR" and i finally - finally - get it. Your eyes have to adjust just like in real life, to go from dark indoors to bright outdoors. you can see tail-lights and headlights in the mountains of NPCs driving around. lasers sweeping you are menacing.

Even fallout 4, which is the first game i played in 4k 10 years ago, looks easily 10 times better in HDR. And i only have the "vanilla+" mod set, 5GB of mods, not the 105GB modset.

I coined the phrase 4 or 5 years ago, that HDR stood for: Hot Damn, Reds! and really, reds are still my least favorite part, they burn to deeply, but from watching several movies on an HDR 4k TV and being real unimpressed, to just these two games, my entire viewpoint has drastically changed.

I didn't know you could put arbitrary people into photo mode in CP2077, and also pose them and move them around, so i was just entering photo mode as best i could and lighting and fiddling with the curves; however, these all took over 4 seconds to "render" to the final image, which i found interesting: https://imgur.com/a/DTesuhF