Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by amarshall » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

uncircle wrote: post #22

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…

> the exposure feature in my iPhone camera…choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process

No, it uses that to set the physical exposure via the shutter speed and ISO (iPhones have a fixed aperture, so that cannot be changed). It literally says this in the video you linked. This is not tone mapping. Tone mapping in a way may also happen afterwards to convert from the wider dynamic range of the sensor if the output format has a more limited dynamic range.

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

#92

Post by mfro » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

os2warpman wrote: post #88

Why does everything (in big-budget video games) look shiny and wet? If it is an attempt at realism, reality is not constantly shiny and wet. If it a subjective artistic choice, it is objectively wrong and ugly. Is there an expectation that everything look shiny and wet to make it seem more "dynamic"? Is it an artists' meme, like the Wilhelm Scream in cinematic sound design?

Overuse of reflective surfaces are the same kind of fad we saw with bloom in the mid 2000s and early 2010s. Now that SSR everywhere is technicaly feasible gamedevs want to use them everywhere. I think this started 5-10 years ago and RTX has renewed the meme, unfortunately.

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

#93

Post by pjerem » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

senko wrote: post #39

markus_zhang wrote: post #30

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, in a nutshell, is why Nintendo is doing so well. Their hardware is underpowered, games look like cheap cartoons, but the effort spent into gameplay more than compensates.

I don't agree here.

Nintendo games don't look like cheap cartoons at all. They are absolutely not photorealistic but they do put a lot of work on the aesthetics/art and it's most of the time relly impressive once you take the hardware limitations into account.

Mario 64 ran on the same console that was known for its 3D blur.

Mario Galaxy 1&2 (which are still totally modern in terms of aesthetics) ran on what was basically an overclocked gamecube.

Mario Kart 8 which is still more beautiful than a lot of modern games ran on the Switch, which is itself based on a 2015 mid-range smartphone hardware.

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

#94

Post by schmidtleonard » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

os2warpman wrote: post #88

Why does everything (in big-budget video games) look shiny and wet? If it is an attempt at realism, reality is not constantly shiny and wet. If it a subjective artistic choice, it is objectively wrong and ugly. Is there an expectation that everything look shiny and wet to make it seem more "dynamic"? Is it an artists' meme, like the Wilhelm Scream in cinematic sound design?

Specular highlights are cheap (frame time and artist time) and beautiful when done right, so everyone tries to do them and they get overcooked.

There is a secondary problem in big budget games where modeling work gets farmed out leading to selection for "what looks good in the preview pic." In the preview pic, the asset artist gets to choose background/scene/lighting, and it's an easy trick to choose them to make the specular highlights pop. The person doing integration buys the asset, drops it in wildly different background/scene/lighting, and now the specular highlights are overcooked because the final scene wasn't chosen for the specific purpose of leveraging specular highlights.

tl;dr artists ship the org chart too

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

#95

Post by perching_aix » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

os2warpman wrote: post #88

Why does everything (in big-budget video games) look shiny and wet? If it is an attempt at realism, reality is not constantly shiny and wet. If it a subjective artistic choice, it is objectively wrong and ugly. Is there an expectation that everything look shiny and wet to make it seem more "dynamic"? Is it an artists' meme, like the Wilhelm Scream in cinematic sound design?

The common wisdom is that it's more difficult to make sunny and dry environments look pretty than it is overcast and wet ones. I tend to agree with this based on the end results I've seen over the many years.

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

#96

Post by markus_zhang » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

glimshe wrote: post #48

markus_zhang wrote: post #30

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.

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’d argue that immersion has little to do with graphics, even for FPS. Actually I had more immersion in some text adventure games than in some AAA games — and not out of nostalgia because I never played the said text adventure games before.

I’d agree that certain degree of graphics helps with immersion, but photorealistic graphics only offers cheap immersion which turns off the immersion centre in the brain — Ok this is just my babble so 100% guess.

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

#97

Post by mfro » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

paulluuk wrote: post #13

I feel like this is very much a personal preference thing. They even called out Horizon Zero Dawn for looking very bad, and Zelda for looking very good.. while in my opinion the exact opposite is true.

I think with enough exposure to the overdone contrast ratios, you start to get tired of it. It sacrifices a lot of clarity. I agree it does look good in some cases, for example I enjoy the look of Battlefield 1 a lot, but when playing it I often noticed I had issues seeing detail in darker areas.

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

#98

Post by dahart » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

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 much detail. The color handling isn’t the only reason they don’t look realistic, but making sure every single pixel’s nicely exposed and that nothing gets too dark or too bright is allowing to let all the CG fakeness show through. One of the reasons the RE7 image looks better is you can’t clearly see every single thing in the image.

If you take photographs outside and the sun is in the shot, you will absolutely get some blown out white and some foreground blacks, and that’s realism. The CG here is trying too hard to squeeze all the color into the visible range. To my eyes, it’s too flat and too low contrast, not too high contrast.

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

#99

Post by HatchedLake721 » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

os2warpman wrote: post #88

Why does everything (in big-budget video games) look shiny and wet? If it is an attempt at realism, reality is not constantly shiny and wet. If it a subjective artistic choice, it is objectively wrong and ugly. Is there an expectation that everything look shiny and wet to make it seem more "dynamic"? Is it an artists' meme, like the Wilhelm Scream in cinematic sound design?

Isn’t Unreal Engine guilty with this? That’s how I often recognize it’s an Unreal Engine game.

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

#100

Post by ascagnel_ » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

glimshe wrote: post #48

markus_zhang wrote: post #30

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.

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…

There's something about the image quality of Cyberpunk that looks off to me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe the hair rendering? Shadowing?

It's clearly going for photo realism, but it somehow looks worse to me than older, lower-fidelity games.