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Why do we need dithering?

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Re: Why do we need dithering?

#111

Post by mrguyorama »

hcs wrote: post #23

You still see dithering from time to time as a cheap transparency, it's been a few years since Mario Odyssey but that's when last I recall it really stood out: https://xcancel.com/chriswade__/status/924071608976924673

I don't know why but I loathe this feature.

It's pretty much the norm now and I think late UE4 in AAA games is what really pushed it?

It's cheap and simple to setup, and most games rely on TAA to make it less annoying.

But TAA sucks! And TAA encourages all sorts of extremely lazy workflows and graphical effects because it will clean them up a little, but they look so bad without it.

I hate it. Raytracing is part of this. It's all just really big companies with billions of dollars cheaping out on authoring good visuals.

Microsoft flight simulator has weird sparkly shadows because it's tracing a few hundred rays and expects you to use TAA to cover it up and it's so bad. Same exact story for reflections.

So now companies expect you to buy $800 GPUs that chew through half a kilowatt of power so that they can be lazy and not care how poorly they've authored their assets and don't really have to consider anything about their visuals.

It makes me sad.

Re: Why do we need dithering?

#112

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #35

We've had a couple of other recent discussions on dithering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750954 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698323 . I commented specifically about the history of blue-noise dithering at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45728231 . The article points out that, historically, RAM limitations were a major incentive for dithering on computer hardware. (It's the reason Heckbert…

I just learned that the Yamaha V9958 video chip used in the MSX2+ implemented something very much like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YJK

Re: Why do we need dithering?

#114

Post by amy_petrik »

dinkelberg wrote: post #103
lelanthran wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did she expressly approve the original, when she didn't know for decades that it was so widely used? Maybe I read the wrong interview with her, but when she found out about it she expressed happiness about it. Since this replacement image was created after her interview, how is it ethically better in any way?

Lena Söderberg expressed her wish for her image to be "retired from tech" in 2019 (see the end of this clip, https://vimeo.com/372265771 ), when the above alternative image was published.

[dead]

Re: Why do we need dithering?

#115

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

black_knight wrote: post #70
cmovq wrote: post #41

Dithering is still very common in rendering pipelines. 8 bits per channel is not enough to capture subtle gradients, and you’ll get tons of banding. Particularly in mostly monochrome gradients produced by light sources. So you render everything to a floating point buffer and apply dithering. Unlike the examples in this post, this dithering is basically invisible at high resolutions, but it’s still very much in use.

Another place where dithering is useful in graphics is when you can’t do enough samples in every point to get a good estimation of some value. Add jitter to each sample and then blur, and then suddenly each point will be influenced by the samples made around them, giving higher fidelity. I recently learned the slogan “Add jitter as close to the quantisation step as possible.” I realised that “quantisation step” is no…

Hell, one could dither vertex positions and normals
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