Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

ventspace.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 219 posts

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#101

Post by genewitch »

glimshe wrote: post #48
markus_zhang wrote: post #30

One big issue I never understood is why do we need photorealism in games at all. They seem to benefit card manufacturers and graphic programmers, but other than that I feel it has nothing to do — and in fact may have negative impact on game quality.

We don't need photorealism in games, but it does help with immersion. Many people, like me, feel like they are inside the game world, rather than playing a game with a TV/monitor in front of them. Photorealism is essential for this feeling - at least for me . The most amazing gaming experience I've ever had was walking around the city at night in Cyberpunk 2077. For the first time in my life, I felt I was actually in…

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

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#102

Post by markus_zhang »

tmtvl wrote: post #65
markus_zhang wrote: post #30

One big issue I never understood is why do we need photorealism in games at all. They seem to benefit card manufacturers and graphic programmers, but other than that I feel it has nothing to do — and in fact may have negative impact on game quality.

Photorealism is a bad idea if your movement engine isn't good enough to handle the character walking around on uneven terrain. For racing games or flight simulators or such it is less of a problem, but seeing a regular person being absolutely flummoxed by a knee-high wall is massively immersion breaking. It's something I really noticed when playing Disaster Report 4, where the people look amazingly realistic but some…

I think it's like porn. Not sure about you guys, but for me soft-core always looks better than HD hardcore. Soft-core encourages imagination and conveniently covers any body part that is a bit far from perfect.

And that's why I always think ladies who wear just enough clothes are way more sexy than nude ladies.

Hopefully this doesn't offend anyone.

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#103

Post by ascagnel_ »

pjerem wrote: post #93
senko wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, in a nutshell, is why Nintendo is doing so well. Their hardware is underpowered, games look like cheap cartoons, but the effort spent into gameplay more than compensates.

I don't agree here. Nintendo games don't look like cheap cartoons at all. They are absolutely not photorealistic but they do put a lot of work on the aesthetics/art and it's most of the time relly impressive once you take the hardware limitations into account. Mario 64 ran on the same console that was known for its 3D blur. Mario Galaxy 1&2 (which are still totally modern in terms of aesthetics) ran on what was basic…

I think it's more that Nintendo's choice of hardware (and its relative lack of horsepower) force them into more stylized visuals because it means photo-realism is basically off the table to start with. We the audience tend not to care, because Nintendo has capable artists who can create something aesthetically pleasing outside of "realistic" graphics.

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#104

Post by windward »

badsectoracula wrote: post #85
windward wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless, it was commonly used for showing off (cloudy, particle-y) raytracing.

Yes but Control isn't sold "just so the end user can enjoy exercising their new GPU and monitor", it is sold for gamers to play a great game. And IMO it is Remedy's best game since Max Payne 2 (i haven't played Alan Wake 2 though) because of its gameplay and atmosphere, not because of its visuals (which, do not get me wrong, are great, but that is largely because of the art direction and visual design, not because of…

I don't really see your point. It was used by benchmarking youtubers for that benchmarking, so it at least sold to them for that reason. It's also the reason I bought it: any later enjoyment is unrelated.

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#105

Post by genewitch »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #100
glimshe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need photorealism in games, but it does help with immersion. Many people, like me, feel like they are inside the game world, rather than playing a game with a TV/monitor in front of them. Photorealism is essential for this feeling - at least for me . The most amazing gaming experience I've ever had was walking around the city at night in Cyberpunk 2077. For the first time in my life, I felt I was actually in…

There's something about the image quality of Cyberpunk that looks off to me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe the hair rendering? Shadowing? It's clearly going for photo realism, but it somehow looks worse to me than older, lower-fidelity games.

DLSS really messes with the realism, however for actual gameplay it's less annoying to me than i thought it would be from such games as diablo IV and others in that cohort. If you want maximum quality, don't let an AI draw what the developers (artists) intended, just draw what the developers intended. i replied to a sibling comment with 4 photo mode screenshots, and you can see that there's a lot of variation in environment lighting, and all of the ambient light is pre-arranged by the design team and developers. In CP2077 a lot of quests are "go to at dusk/dawn/night/noon, or between x&y time, because they want the scene to be cinematic, and it shows. Harsh fluorescent lighting on scenes with a doctor, muted, hazy interactions with a shady character or a scene with emotional turmoil, long shadows and lots of reds at the end of a story arc.

It really feels like they put so much work into how everything looks in the primary and secondary stories.

i can agree though that just "jobbing" it looks more like a run-of-the-mill shooter, though.

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#106

Post by the__alchemist »

Hmm. I like the author's main point in many video games doing this unrealistically, but there are a few sticking points that are relevant from the past few years:

  - The omission of discussing HDR monitors, and how you can't really capture that on a screenshot. This is a game changer, especially with new games and monitors.
  - The omissions of discussing Unreal5 games that have come out in the past few years. (e.g. Talos principle 2, Hellblade 2, Stalker 2)
  - Not enough examples of games that do it well, with A/B comparisons of similar settings
  - The Nintendo screenshot as an example of doing things right isn't working for me.
Another interesting example of lighting done well is Kingdome Come Deliverance 2. The details don't look nearly as nice as, e.g. UE5 game and it unfortunately doesn't support monitor HDR, but it has very realistic looking lighting and scenes.

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#107

Post by kevingadd »

dahart wrote: post #98

I truly don’t understand the author’s opinions about contrast here. The RE7 image is the only one here that looks ‘realistic’, and at a glance could be mistaken for a photograph, and he says it’s got way too much contrast. No other image here comes anywhere even close, definitely not Zelda nor GTA5. Personally I think the whole problem with the first 5 images is that they don’t have enough contrast, and they have too…

One problem with photorealism is a lot of players are on bad displays, or in bad viewing environments. Games often take this into account in their visual direction so that they will be more legible in these different environments. It used to be even worse when designing a game for say the Gameboy Advance or original Nintendo DS where you knew the screen wasn't backlit or wasn't particularly bright so your images needed to be bright and colorful. Even now, a Nintendo Switch game might be played on the bus.

For big budget games the solution for this is typically to have brightness calibration when the game first boots up, but the game itself still needs to be designed adaptively so that it's not Too Dark or Too Bright at critical points, otherwise the playability of the title is jeopardized. This runs counter to a goal of photorealism.

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#108

Post by fleabitdev »

markus_zhang wrote: post #30

One big issue I never understood is why do we need photorealism in games at all. They seem to benefit card manufacturers and graphic programmers, but other than that I feel it has nothing to do — and in fact may have negative impact on game quality.

I've wondered whether photorealism creates its own demand. Players spend hours in high-realism game worlds, their eyes adjust, and game worlds from ten years ago suddenly feel wrong; not just old-fashioned, but fake.

This is also true for non-photorealistic 3D games. They benefit from high-tech effects like outline shaders, sharp shadows, anti-aliasing and LoD blending - but all of that tech is improving over time, so older efforts don't look quite right any more, and today's efforts won't look quite right in 2045.

When a game developer decides to step off this treadmill, they usually make a retro game. I'd like to see more deliberately low-tech games which aren't retro games. If modern players think your game looks good on downlevel hardware, then it will continue to look good as hardware continues to improve - I think this is one reason why Nintendo games have so much staying power.

This has been the norm in 2D game development for ages, but it's much more difficult in 3D. For example, if the player is ever allowed to step outdoors, you'll struggle to meet modern expectations for draw distance and pop-in - and even if your game manages to have cutting-edge draw distance for 2025, who can say whether future players will still find it convincing? The solution is to only put things in the camera frustum when you know you can draw them with full fidelity; everything in the game needs to look as good as it's ever going to look.

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#109

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

os2warpman wrote: post #88

Why does everything (in big-budget video games) look shiny and wet? If it is an attempt at realism, reality is not constantly shiny and wet. If it a subjective artistic choice, it is objectively wrong and ugly. Is there an expectation that everything look shiny and wet to make it seem more "dynamic"? Is it an artists' meme, like the Wilhelm Scream in cinematic sound design?

I thought this was going to be the subject of the article. For years now, everything looks weirdly shiny.

Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

#110

Post by cubefox »

the__alchemist wrote: post #106

Hmm. I like the author's main point in many video games doing this unrealistically, but there are a few sticking points that are relevant from the past few years: - The omission of discussing HDR monitors, and how you can't really capture that on a screenshot. This is a game changer, especially with new games and monitors. - The omissions of discussing Unreal5 games that have come out in the past few years. (e.g. Tal…

The article is from 2017.
Post reply on HN