Resolved Updated from 2019.4 to 2021.3: Everything's so much brighter?

I'm updating my project from 2019.4 to 2021.3. This has been a much smoother experience than I was expecting, so I'm very happy about that. The main difference I noticed is that everything's brighter in 2021.3 than it was in 2019.4, and I can't find a reason why.

I've turned off all post-processing and volumes in my scene, but the 2021.3 version is significantly brighter. I'd just like to find out whether that "makes sense" to anyone familiar with the way HDRP has evolved over the last several releases, or whether this is a cause for concern.

Here's an example of the scene under 2019.4:



And the same scene in 2021.3:



From what I can tell, lights are just brighter in 2021.3, for some reason, even though they all have the same values as I was using in 2019.4.

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks to @valarus for the help with this one.

The issue turned out to be the "Compensation" value on my Global HDRP settings. That field seems to have always had a value of "1", since the file was generated under 2019.x, despite not appearing in the UI in 2019.x, and also apparently not having any effect on anything. But under 2021, that adjusts the exposure in all scene.



The "fix" for me was to change Compensation to 0 and/or to uncheck it so that the value isn't used. Doing that puts my lighting back to what I was expecting.