PS3's Inability to perform HDR + FSAA

[Jawed]

Why?

If you can generate banding problems fairly easily in FP16 pixel shaders then you need more, don't you?

It does depend on the number of operations on the backbuffer, so if you're only going to do a few then there won't be any banding.

DeanoC said there were banding problems with FP16 rendering of clouds, a few months back.

You seem pleased that you've got better precision out of your technique than you had with FP16.

So it seems there's plenty of evidence that FP16 isn't enough for the general case of HDR lighting.

Jawed

 

[London Geezer]

Not all games though. Some devs might end up using FP16 only, some might not use HDR at all...

Yes sorry, i should have put "could" instead of "will"...

 

[ERP]

I've argued this before - but IMO the R&D directions in certain fields/products are often influenced by marketting - and in some cases what you'll get are features that are better marketable - rather then actually better usable.

I'll go further than that and say that almost all harware and software is significantly influenced by the marketing and sales departments, and in some cases they more or less design it.

 

[DeanoC]

DeanoC said there were banding problems with FP16 rendering of clouds, a few months back.

But I never said what that cloud renderer was doing... The issue was the amount of alpha blending, its not going to be an issue in practise. Nobody is going to do what we tried doing in that particular bit of research (Frank wanted to use a less brute force method but couldn't get fast enough feedback from the GPU on the PC he was deving on at that time).