[Warner306]

I've seen that. Honestly, to a lay person that article is just nonsense. Tone mapping intelligently compresses luminance. It doesn't do much more than that.

madVR is tone mapping in PQ nits as per BT.2390 to a target display brightness. But this has to be converted to an SDR gamma curve. The gamma curve should always provide an optimum result within its actual target brightness, but it is often better to use the relative gamma curve to spread out BT.2390 (go above the display target brightness) to get more contrast. Changing the target nits kind of makes the PQ curve disappear because the mapped values are no longer 1:1 with BT.2390 in terms of absolute luminance, but it works because the gamma curve increases or decreases overall contrast in a uniform manner.