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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)

#52

It's not just games, it's regular day-to-day UI too. I'm using an Acer 185Hz VRR HDR10 Gaming monitor.. on Eco mode with HDR disabled. Everything just looks better with HDR turned off for some reason I can't explain.

That's normal. For HDR to look good, you need a monitor that hits approximately 1000 nits in brightness. Your monitor only hits 250, which is completely insufficient to display HDR content. This is one of the stupid things with many monitors, showing HDR at 250 nits is worse than showing no HDR at all. So no matter what you do, 99% of HDR content will look bad on your screen.

> For HDR to look good, you need a monitor that hits approximately 1000 nits in brightness.

I disagree. The wide color gamut is -for me- a huge thing about HDR. My VA monitor provides ~300 nits of brightness and I've been quite happy with the games that didn't phone in their HDR implementation.

Plus, any non-trash HDR monitor will tell the computer it's attached to what its maximum possible brightness is, so the software running on that computer can adjust its renderer accordingly.

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

#53

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.

My take is that video game devs learn to aspire to cinema, since they're both making "entertainment art that exists on a screen" and cinema is more widely accepted as art among the intelligentsia (not that I agree).

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the author posits that Zelda explicitly goes for artistry and ignores any pretense of realism (that then falls flat on it's face when using an over-contrasting tone-map like in the HZD screenshot).

The problem I personally have with the Zelda example given is that it looks really bland to me - the landscape looks really washed out - the author says "Somebody would paint this. It’s artistic.", but I don't think anyone would paint with such bleached-out colours.

yeah, no one would ever do that https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_2000,h_1600,c_limit,f_...

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

#55
post #45

I found this video to visualise what tone mapping is trying to achieve, and why "photorealism" is hard to achieve in computer graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AT7H4GGrA And I indirectly taught me how to use the exposure feature in my iPhone camera (when you tap a point in the picture). It's so that you choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process, using your eyes which have a…

I've heard a good point that our eyes have, in fact, a boring 1:100 range of brightness. Eyes can rapidly adjust, but the real game changer is our ability to create an image in our video memory, which has an unlimited brightness range. Eyes give us maybe a 2d uint8 framebuffer, but our mind creates and updates a float32 3d buffer. This is why this experience cannot be reproduced on a screen.

If our eyes can only see 100:1, why is OLED taking off? LCD has been claiming 1000:1 for decades

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

#57

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.

This. To me one of the reasons why Coffee Stain Studios is such a successful publisher is that its games typically don't push for visual realism for the sake of it (hardly possible anyway when they feature dwarves, alien species and the like).

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

#58

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.

For the same reason it was searched for in painting for so long, and for the same reason movies and plays often meticulously recreate (or film in) real locales and use period-appropriate attire: people, by and large, love looking at reality way more than stylized images.

There are exceptions, but the general public will almost always prefer a photo-realistic renaissance painting to a Picasso portrait, a lavish period piece like Titanic to an experimental set design like Dogville.

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

#59

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.

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