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

121–130 of 219 posts

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

#121

Post by the__alchemist »

esafak wrote: post #114

The screenshot of "Zelda: Breath of the Wild " the author holds up as an exemplar looks unrealistically tone mapped to me. The "bad" screenshots in the lede look more natural and pleasing. Not realistic -- they're too stylized for my taste -- but the Zelda screenshot is simply unrealistic in a different direction.

This is an example of a phenomenon I've seen many times on the internet:

  - Person has a critique of certain media (books, authors, games etc). They are valid critiques. 
  - You ask what the person thinks is an example of media that doesn't have this problem, or the media they like. 
  - The examples given are not in the same league, or do the one thing better, and many other aspects poorly.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by cubefox »

the__alchemist wrote: post #119
cubefox wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is from 2017.

Oh wow. I wonder what the author thinks of the new trends! I bet he or she would be pleasantly surprised by some of them.

Yeah, since then there were some games with very natural looking contrast and colors, perhaps most notably Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Or, years later, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (2025), which you already mentioned. As a negative example: as far as I can tell, Horizon Forbidden West (2022) mostly doubled down on the exaggerated color contrast he criticized in the predecessor.

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

#125

Post by the__alchemist »

cubefox wrote: post #123
the__alchemist wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow. I wonder what the author thinks of the new trends! I bet he or she would be pleasantly surprised by some of them.

Yeah, since then there were some games with very natural looking contrast and colors, perhaps most notably Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Or, years later, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (2025), which you already mentioned. As a negative example: as far as I can tell, Horizon Forbidden West (2022) mostly doubled down on the exaggerated color contrast he criticized in the predecessor.

Concur on Forbidden West having the same problem as HZD that the author mentioned. I remember thinking about the dark/indoor areas with accent lighting, and vegetation in particular compared to similar scenes in Talos Principle 2. (Similar release dates) HZD wasn't in the same league as Talos.

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

#126

Post by SirMaster »

This seems pretty irrelevant now. This article is from 2017 which is before we had proper real HDR support in Windows 10 and much better HDR support now in Windows 11.

And before we had OLED gaming monitors which can actually now display good HDR at 1000+ nits.

This was definitely during a transitional phase with mostly fake HDR techniques that needed tone-mapping. Now we have real HDR that doesn't need tone-mapping, or only a small amount of tone-mapping above the display peak nits point.

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

#127

Post by pflenker »

I skipped the text and looked at the images and was unable to understand if they were supposed to be bad or good examples. I liked them. Then k read through the text and learned that they are supposed to be bad examples.

But why though? I suspect that either I am not good at this kind of thing, or this is a purist thing, like „don’t put pineapples on pizza because they don’t do that in Italy“.

I don’t want games to look realistic. A rainy day outside looks gray and drab, there is nothing wrong with rainy days in games not looking like the real thing, but awesome and full of contrasts.

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

#128

Post by otikik »

The article lacks some examples of what "done right" means. It points to some videogames that "do it terribly" (they look ok to me? not photorealistic, but not every videogame has to be like that?) but it does not show how "a correct" version of each image would be. Just says "it looks obviously bad". Sorry but I don't see it. I'm fine with videogames looking videogamey.

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

#129

Post by someuser2345 »

Arainach wrote: post #61
windward wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some games are sold just so the end user can enjoy exercising their new GPU and monitor. Crysis and Control come to mind.

>Control Did we play the same game? Some of the best lore-building and environmental theming around, paired with some cool mechanics? Sure, the combat got repetitive but this was hardly something to "just sell GPUs"

That's not the game I played.

The lore was annoying to listen to; whenever I wanted to listen to an audio log, I had to stop playing the game and watch the exact same video of a man smoking and being mysterious.

The cool game mechanics were basically just the gravity gun from Half Life 2, which came out over 20 years ago.

It did have some cool environmental set pieces, but overall I just found the game too pretentious for something that was basically a rip off of the SCP wiki.

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

#130

Post by ToucanLoucan »

Swizec wrote: post #89
tmtvl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For racing games or flight simulators or such it is less of a problem, Cars are also easier to make photorealistic. Less uncanny valley effect, lots of flat shiny surfaces. What absolutely breaks immersion for me in most AAA car games is the absolute lack of crash, scratch, and dirt mechanics. Cars racing around the track for 2 hours don’t look like showroom pieces! Make ‘em dirty darn it. And when I crash into a w…

I had a great time recently on my first trip to a racetrack, and the most surprising thing to me was how all the cars were utterly beat to shit. Not like in a bad way, but in like... a sports gear way? They were all working (well, mostly, one guy had a real bad time on his second lap and I'm pretty sure his engine was DONE) but the panels were quite battered, and a number had full on body damage I'm assuming from track contact.

And granted this was an amateur race day, just weekenders having a good time, but it makes sense when you think about it: if the body panels aren't like falling off and are just a bit beat up... why replace them? Especially on some of these cars (late model Corvettes and Mustangs) they don't come cheap at all, and they'll require refinishing and you have to do your livery over again too.

Like a hockey player doesn't buy a new helmet every time they get hit, they/the team would be broke before the season was out.

Post reply on HN