My colors look washed out and my blacks look gray. Is HDR10+ GAMING broken?

Washed-out colors and gray blacks are symptoms of a misconfiguration, not a flaw in the standard. The three most common causes are:

• Double tone-mapping: With HDR10+ GAMING, the game engine performs all tone mapping on the GPU, optimized for your display. Your display should simply show what it receives. If your display is also applying its own tone mapping, the image gets processed twice and looks flat. This can be fixed by ensuring the display is in HDR10+ GAMING mode.
• Windows HDR settings: The ‘SDR content brightness’ slider in Windows affects non-HDR content only. For HDR10+ GAMING, make sure your Windows HDR is enabled and ensure your display’s Game Mode is on. Follow the setup steps found in Question 5.
• Display not in Game Mode: First, check is your display is HDR10+ GAMING certified. If not, some displays apply additional video processing outside of Game Mode, which conflicts with the Game engine-rendered signal. Switch to Game Mode so the display renders the HDR10+ GAMING signal as intended.