Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

I agree that 250 nits is too low, but my monitor clocks in at 400 and HDR already looks better, if only thanks to the increased colour channel resolution - particularly visible in highlights, clouds etc. Where there previously was just a single colour blob I now can observe details impossible to display with just eight bits per channel.

Interestingly my laptop's display reaches 500 nits and that is already painfully high outside of midday hours. My phone goes to 875 and I find that only to be useful outside in the summer sun.

Yes, like everything: Nylon might be my favourite example of us never being able to use innovation in moderation.

I do see the point of the author: HZD goes for a "realistic", high-fidelity 3D fantasy world, yet the lighting makes no sense in physical terms. The contrast and brightness shown in the picture are all over the place, and can only be an artifact of visualising a world through a computer screen which has a very limited dynamic range - it is immersion-breaking. The Resident Evil 7 picture below looks much better. The video I linked in another comment explains why: in the physical world, the stronger the light, the more washed-out the colour will become. HZD is a saturated, high-contrast mess with too much compression in the low light, because of a bad colour mapper in their pipeline.

One can claim HZD's look is an "artistic choice" and that's inarguable, but the author believes it's simply not enough attention to the tone mapping process, which is a very complicated topic that's not usually taken seriously in game dev compared to film production.

One game that actually puts a lot of effort into this is X-plane. They use physics based rendering and with recent updates they have done quite a bit of work on this (clouds, atmosphere, natural looking colors and shadows, HDR, etc.

There's a stark contrast here with MS Flight Simulator which looks great but maybe a bit too pretty. It's certainly very pleasing to look at but not necessarily realistic.

One thing with flying is that visibility isn't necessarily that good and a big part of using flight simulators professionally is actually learning to fly when the visibility is absolutely terrible. What's the relevance of scenery if visibility is at the legal minimums? You see the ground shortly before you land, a few feet in front of you.

And even under better conditions, things are hazy and flat (both in color and depth). A crisp, high contrast, saturated view is pretty but not what a pilot deals with. A real problem for pilots is actually spotting where the airport is. Which is surprisingly hard even when the weather is nice and sunny.

An interesting HDR challenge with cockpits is that the light level inside and outside are miles apart. When flying in the real world, your eyes compensate for this when you focus on the instruments or look outside. But technically any screenshot that features a bright outside and clearly legible instruments at the same time is not very realistic but also kind of necessary. You need to do some HDR trickery to make that work. Poor readability of instruments is something X-plane addressed in one of their recent updates. It was technically correct but not that readable.

X-plane rendering has made some big improvements with all this during the v12 release over the last three years.

Please watch this for yet another take on the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j68UW21Nx6g

The points are: game graphics is indeed suffering, but the problem is not being unlike films and photos, it's the opposite. The games should stop using film industry produced tone mapping curves and instead create their own, making a clean break.

Personally, I agree with the video.