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Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

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

#201

Post by simoncion »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #200
simoncion wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VA screens have pretty damn good contrast, and OLED monitors tend to have low peak (and sometimes even spot!) brightness. A while back, I tried an OLED gaming monitor that was widely reviewed as being very good. While it was somewhat better than the VA monitor that I've been using for years, it was nowhere near 1,500 USD good. I could see someone coming from an IPS or TN screen being very impressed with it, though.

VA screens have terrible black smearing though. I also bought an OLED display and returned it because it was just very dim. I own a miniled display that peaks at 1000cd full screen (it has a fan to handle the heat) and I'm still looking for an OLED replacement.

> VA screens have terrible black smearing though.

It depends on the monitor and the colors involved in the transition. My VA monitor (a BenQ EW3270U) has limited-but-noticeable smearing between certain dark colors. Blacks and dark colors against mid-brightness and brighter are just fine. [0] It's my understanding that this monitor has quite-a-bit-less-bad color smearing than most VA panels, and has roughly the same -er- amount of slow transitions (just with a different set of colors) as my Asus PA246 IPS monitor.

I play a variety of video games, so I see both muddily-dark and high-contrast areas. I'm fairly pleased with the performance of the panel they dropped into this monitor. Honestly, the off-axis color and contrast shifting is way more noticeable than the color smearing... and folks who sit down in front of this monitor don't tend to notice those shifts.

(Plus, if you play 3D video games released within the last five years, crap like temporal-anti-aliasing and its bastard children add so much smearing and rendering artifacts that it becomes quite challenging to determine what visual artifacts are actual pixels commanded to be on the screen by the renderer, and what might from too-slow flipping of the pixels in the screen. Is this a good state of affairs? Definitely not. But it's the one we find ourselves in.)

[0] It's entirely unlike the OLED screen in the Nexus 5a which has incredible smearing between black and a huge array of dark-to-medium-brightness colors. This smearing reduces as you increase the brightness of the screen, but doesn't go away entirely until you get to like the top quarter of the screen's brightness. (If you have one of these phones, drop your screen brightness to the bottom quarter and browse through back issues of the Gunnerkrigg Court webcomic. There are PLENTY of black-on-X color combinations to get a really obvious demonstration of the problem.)

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

#202

Post by carlosjobim »

dahart wrote: post #192
carlosjobim wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cloudy day here and I'm within my rather dimly lit office. If I look out the window, it is no problem to see clouds in all their details, and I don't loose any details within the darker environment in the room. A camera will either blow out the entire sky outside the window to capture the details in the room - or make the room entirely black to capture the details of the sky through the window. I mean, most pe…

The first three pictures in the article have direct sun visible in the sky and not clipping. I was referring to that. The sun itself does blow out when you look directly at it, but please don’t spend time staring at the sun as it will damage your eyes. The dynamic range of human eyes is not vastly superior to cameras. Look it up, or measure. It’s easy to feel like eyes have more range because of adaptation, foveation…

I can compare my eyes to a camera everywhere I go, because I carry a smartphone in my pocket. And so do most people. My eyes can handle scenes with varying brightness much better than any camera, and the reason is probably that cameras have to take still pictures while the eyes receive a continuous feed. Even shooting film or video, cameras still work by a series of still pictures.

> Again, I didn’t argue that games should imitate cameras. But that would be better than what we have in games; movies look way better than the game screenshots in this article.

I agree, but movie makers take care to avoid having visible over or under exposure in scenes. And they do other things that take away from realism, but makes the movie better looking. If they aimed for total realism, any movie would just look like a soap opera.

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

#203

Post by cubefox »

the__alchemist wrote: post #125
cubefox wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. I think it comes down to the following property of the tone mapping curve: if there is high brightness contrast, the colors of the bright parts should become desaturated. It's probably why this screenshot looks so realistic:

https://ventspace.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/i...

The contrast is very high, but the colors of the bright part has appropriately low color saturation. Which seems to match how our eyes, and cameras, perceive things when there are large differences in brightness (which a display can't directly reproduce, which is why tone mapping is necessary in the first place).

Most engines in the past apparently did this wrong, they kept the color saturation the same irrespective of brightness.

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

#204

Post by mananaysiempre »

wkjagt wrote: post #195
pflenker wrote: post #127

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 l…

From what I understood is that these are supposedly bad because they look like video games instead of photographs. Not sure what the problem with that is though. I'm fine with video games looking like video games.

I also thought that, but then I scrolled down to the Breath of the Wild shot and got (part of) it: BotW has an awesomely rendered sky, whereas the CoD and to a lesser extent HZD ones have a desaturated, largely overexposed mess (despite all my affection for HZD). The Smaug shot is flawed in a similar manner.

And the photography comparison does come to mind immediately, because that kind of thing is in fact what you’ll get from a DSLR on a sunny day if you don’t know what you’re doing, and to some extent from a film camera too (I’m speaking about the sky only—the HZD shot has much too large a dynamic range to capture on a real camera without compositing). Photographers have a huge bags of tricks to deal with the problem, from taking photos in early morning light to darkening parts of a shot with a graduated ND filter to underexposing and fixing it up in post (before digital, that meant chemistry).

I think it is fair to hold games to this standard. It’s not that they have to look like photos. It’s that they shouldn’t have flaws in their look that have been recognized and solved for photos for more than a century.

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

#205

Post by meinersbur »

Researchers trained a deep learning network on photos to make GTA5 more realistic-looking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0

I was surprised that most of it is is just tone mapping. It looks too green-ish to me, needing some white balancing, but realistic.

I think Video games are intentionally over-saturated and contrasty to make them look better, just as paintings are[1]. I took many screenshots in Horizon Zero Dawn that would be look bland if it was realistic like the modfified GTA5 footage above[2]. You also don't want animation movies[3] with realistic tone mapping. But for a horror game you would do exactly that, it's about immersion (or you would never be frightened), not beauty.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/1ix7ms2/my_hzd_oil...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/x97gi1/this_game_i...

[3] https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0892769/mediaviewer/rm284102...

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

#206

Post by moribvndvs »

pflenker wrote: post #127

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 l…

The intro is basically “lol these are trashy and terrible and none of them could pass as even a mediocre film or photo”

They look fine to me and good, these aren’t films or photos, and you’ll need to convince me that they _should_ look like them.

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

#207

Post by saltcured »

meinersbur wrote: post #205

Researchers trained a deep learning network on photos to make GTA5 more realistic-looking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 I was surprised that most of it is is just tone mapping. It looks too green-ish to me, needing some white balancing, but realistic. I think Video games are intentionally over-saturated and contrasty to make them look better, just as paintings are[1]. I took many screenshots in Horizon…

That's pretty funny... at least the narrator seems to reference the problem. It is trying to normalize it to some model of reality extracted from photos of Germany.

I think the stock game footage may be too contrasty but has much more realistic coloring for how Southern California actually looks in the summer.

Chalk one up for needing reality filters to include a notion of locale-specific and season-specific references?

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

#208

Post by dontlaugh »

chihuahua wrote: post #161
pflenker wrote: post #127

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 l…

I totally agree. The example pictures in the article look fine. I don't know what the author wants, but perhaps it's some kind of industry insider view similar to where "true artists' make movies that are so dark you can't see anything, and the dialog is quiet mumbling and the sound effects are ear-shattering. Perhaps there's an equivalent to that in games.

It's the opposite. The author wants to be able to see the detail, as opposed to it being lost in crushed blacks and blown out whites.

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

#209

Post by xg15 »

pflenker wrote: post #127

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 l…

I believe the author, but I'd also have liked some "before/after" comparisons, where the sane scene is shown with the actual, "bad" tone map and a fixed one.

You can get a bit of a feel for what the author meant though if you compare them with the "good" examples further below, in particular the Zelda one.

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

#210

Post by pradn »

kllrnohj wrote: post #174
pradn wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large section of the gaming public sees photo-realistic games as serious, and prefers them for high-budget games. It's a rat race for devs though - its just incredibly expensive to create high quality models, textures, maps. I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and while the graphics are great, it's clear they could do more in the visual realm. It doesn't use current gen hardware to the maximum, in every way, because…

> In Cyberpunk, you still have to wait around in elevators, which seem like diegetic loading screens. Cyberpunk has vanishingly few elevators. While it may be a loading hide in some spots, it's certainly not indicative of the game which otherwise has ~zero loading screens as you free roam the city including going in & out of highly detailed buildings and environments. > I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and while the…

I'm with you - there are few elevators, yes. Still somewhat clunky for me.

Cyberpunk is certainly an achievement for technical graphics - fog, light, reflections etc. These are all enhanced with cutting-edge hardware.

What I'm trying to say is that we're quite far along in one visual axis, but for the whole experience to be amazing, we have a lot of work to do in other axes. Clunky character animations and body shapes take away from the amazing fidelity we get with light/fog, etc.

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