All of the "bad" examples look like they're playing on a PC with poorly set gamma curves. Play on a TV where the curves are setup properly because TV people actually care about color reproduction.
Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
71–80 of 219 posts
Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
In my case it's because the motion clarity of OLED is excellent.
Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
#73Earlier 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"
Nevertheless, it was commonly used for showing off (cloudy, particle-y) raytracing.
Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the author's list of "ugly" games is missing Witcher III, Hellblade, God of War (2018), Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate... And we need some examples of good, cinematic, artful tone mapping, like any scene of a Hollywood movie set in Mexico...
In my experience Elden Ring looks better when you turn the graphics quality down. Baldur's Gate isn't particularly ugly for a '98 game. And I agree that it would be nice to have some positive examples. I think there were a bunch of SNES games which did it well, but that may just be nostalgia.
given the rest of the games listed I assume he means baldurs gate 3. Many younger people out themselves by just calling it baldurs gate.
Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
#75One 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.
We don't need photorealism in games, but it does help with immersion. Many people, like me, feel like they are inside the game world, rather than playing a game with a TV/monitor in front of them. Photorealism is essential for this feeling - at least for me . The most amazing gaming experience I've ever had was walking around the city at night in Cyberpunk 2077. For the first time in my life, I felt I was actually in…
Out of curiosity do you not get immersed in books?
Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
#76One 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.
We don't need photorealism in games, but it does help with immersion. Many people, like me, feel like they are inside the game world, rather than playing a game with a TV/monitor in front of them. Photorealism is essential for this feeling - at least for me . The most amazing gaming experience I've ever had was walking around the city at night in Cyberpunk 2077. For the first time in my life, I felt I was actually in…
I find this an interesting argument. I wonder if it's a generational thing.
If we define immersion as "your vision focuses on what's inside the screen and you ignore the world around the screen, and you mostly ignore that your control of the player character is through a keyboard and mouse", then I've experienced immersion with every first person game ever, including Minecraft. I never considered that some people might need photorealism for that at all. There was another commenter that mentioned being unable to walk over a short wall due to character controller limitations as being immersion-breaking. I agree this is annoying but the qualia of it is more like a physical confusion rather than being something that actually breaks my experience of the game.
I'm also thinking this might be related to why I find VR to be, while very cool, not some revolutionary new technology that will fundamentally change the world.
Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
#77One 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.
> One big issue I never understood is why do we need photorealism in games at all
Because WOW factor sells, specially if it's a new ip. You can see most trailers full of comments "this looks bad".
Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't need photorealism in games, but it does help with immersion. Many people, like me, feel like they are inside the game world, rather than playing a game with a TV/monitor in front of them. Photorealism is essential for this feeling - at least for me . The most amazing gaming experience I've ever had was walking around the city at night in Cyberpunk 2077. For the first time in my life, I felt I was actually in…
You're not alone, Cyberpunk's blend of near-future with realism whilst maintaining a clear art style that is not total realism is very immersive. I have spent countless hours wandering around Night City, not even playing the main gameplay.
CP2077 was the game I drove most carefully in when not on a mission, just coz it felt right that V wouldn't be hooning around his home turf. The immersion was incredible.
Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
#79As someone who worked a lot in realistic VFX I concur with the observation that nearly no game is doing tone mapping right and my guess to why that is always has been the fact that doing it right is just very complex.
There are many, many things artists need to do correctly, many of which have no idea of the whole pipeline. Let's say someone creates a scene with a tree in it. What is the correct brightness, saturation and gamma of that trees texture? And if that isn't correct, how could the lighting artist correctly set the light? And if the texture and the light is wrong the correct tone lmap will look like shit.
My experience is that you need to do everything right for a good tonemap to look realistically, and that means working like a scientist and having an idea of the underlying physical formulae and the way it has been implemented digitally. And that is sadly something not many productions appear to pull off. But if you pull it off everything pops into place.
The added complication with games is of course that you can't just oprimize the light for one money shot, it needs to look good from all directions. And that means it is hard to make it look as good as a film shot, because that risks making it look like crap from other directions which studios aren't willing to risk.
The dragon in The Hobbit isn't just about the tonemapping, it is at least as much (if not more so) a lighting issue. But the two can influence each other in a bad way.
Re: Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
#80One 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.
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…
This is true in Wukong too, which is otherwise a very good-looking game. There are various points where rocks and scaffolds look just as climbable as those in the game area, yet the game engine places an invisible wall in your way. It breaks immersion instantly.