What is HDR 128bit?

[Farid]

Makes life considerable easier and allows HDR special fx (particles etc.)

I wouldn't want to go back to no blending but as over half our HDR engine were written without it, its disingenuous to say that ATI don't support HDR.

If Chalnoth read this, be ready to jump in your flameproof suit, Deano.

 

[mckmas8808]

Ok thanks for clearing that up for me. I didn't know that HDR blending can make particles. I thought it was just for lighting.
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Herb Scales

 

[BOOMEXPLODE]

Think of it like the move from 16bit to 32bit framebuffers many years ago. It's just more precision. A common misconception is that you need HDR to do light blooms, which is incorrect, several PS2 games have this effect without any HDR capability in the hardware.

 

[phat]

Think of it like the move from 16bit to 32bit framebuffers many years ago. It's just more precision. A common misconception is that you need HDR to do light blooms, which is incorrect, several PS2 games have this effect without any HDR capability in the hardware.

Isn't PS2 "bloom" all vertex-based and really hokey?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Creating Light Bloom (you can try this in Photoshop, PSP etc.)

1) Take source image
2) change the contrast/brightness (using histogram ideally) to black out everything below a certain light level, and graduate up to white for full brightness. This isolates the lightest areas in the image
3) Apply a gaussian blur
4) Combine these blurred highlights to the original source image with additive or other blending type depending on desired look.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

And stop mixing up bloom and HDR... please!

 

[phat]

Creating Light Bloom (you can try this in Photoshop, PSP etc.)

1) Take source image
2) change the contrast/brightness (using histogram ideally) to black out everything below a certain light level, and graduate up to white for full brightness. This isolates the lightest areas in the image
3) Apply a gaussian blur
4) Combine these blurred highlights to the original source image with additive or other blending type depending on desired look.

This is rather bad bloom, and isn't what's done in PS2 titles.

 

[marconelly!]

Unreal 3 tech heavily using HDR (Gears of war) is shown working very well on XBOX 360. I don't think it'll be much of an issue.

The game has not yet been demonstrated on final Xbox 360 hardware, though. It has been demonstrated on Alpha devkits with X800 or X850, and the framerate was really poor on them. At E3, the game has been actually demonstrated behind closed doors on 6800SLI configs with Xbox 360 pad attached to them...

Current ATI cards DO support HDR, just not blending... ATI R3x0 and R4x0 support a nice 16 bit integer format (which also have filtering) which apart from blending works nicely for HDR.

So R500 will have support for (usable as far as speed goes) FP10 blending? What kind of quality should that provide compared to FP16 or FP32? Deano, what do you expect performance hit to be in your engine when using FP16 blending on RSX? What about full FP32? How advantageous is 128bit even going to be, and how much of a performance hit will it present?

 

[repi]

It does support tiling and I'm told it does support FP16, however the 10-10-10-2 format is probably likely to be most frequently used - the Ruby demo was using this format, so it sounds like this is actually the default. Dev kits have X800/X850's which don't have float blending.

What? The PC Ruby demo couldn't have used the 7e3 HDR format since it is not available on any PC graphics chip. Or did you mean 10-10-10-2 integer format?

 

[nAo]

What? The PC Ruby demo couldn't have used the 7e3 HDR format since it is not available on any PC graphics chip. Or did you mean 10-10-10-2 integer format?

Changing render target format (to another one that has the same size) is a matter of seconds if the features subset you app is using is completely orthogonal to the old and new format.

 

[Tim]

What? The PC Ruby demo couldn't have used the 7e3 HDR format since it is not available on any PC graphics chip. Or did you mean 10-10-10-2 integer format?

He is talking about the new Ruby demo that ran on actual Xbox360 hardware.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Creating Light Bloom (you can try this in Photoshop, PSP etc.)

This is rather bad bloom, and isn't what's done in PS2 titles.

Just showing you don't need HDR to do bloom. To be frank I wish no-one used it. It's totally overused and leads to poor visuals. Honestly, most games using bloom look like you've just woken up and haven't rubbed the sleep from your eyes yet!

 

[mckmas8808]

Honestly, most games using bloom look like you've just woken up and haven't rubbed the sleep from your eyes yet!

Yeah Jade Empire anybody.
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Ford maverick (north america) picture

 

[London Geezer]

Creating Light Bloom (you can try this in Photoshop, PSP etc.)

This is rather bad bloom, and isn't what's done in PS2 titles.

Just showing you don't need HDR to do bloom. To be frank I wish no-one used it. It's totally overused and leads to poor visuals. Honestly, most games using bloom look like you've just woken up and haven't rubbed the sleep from your eyes yet!

I agree. White has been substituted with BLEEDING ROUND THE EDGES WHITE-ISH YELLOW-ISH BLURRY MESS.

 

[repi]

He is talking about the new Ruby demo that ran on actual Xbox360 hardware.

Oh ok, I missed that one

 

[phat]

Creating Light Bloom (you can try this in Photoshop, PSP etc.)

This is rather bad bloom, and isn't what's done in PS2 titles.

Just showing you don't need HDR to do bloom. To be frank I wish no-one used it. It's totally overused and leads to poor visuals. Honestly, most games using bloom look like you've just woken up and haven't rubbed the sleep from your eyes yet!

Bloom is a pervasive, natural phenomenon of real optics, be they the lens in our eyes or a camera, and is essential to achieve photorealism. But natural bloom is much, much more subtle than the ham-fisted bloom used in today's games, and to create bloom with this level of subtety requires HDR. Natural bloom only occurs for highly overbright areas, because only high amounts of light would make the infinitesimal amount of scattering in real optics visible. Without HDR, you don't have much distinction between overbright and non-overbright, and you'll end up garishly blooming at light intensities well below those that would cause bloom in real life.