Will HDR take off at this point in time?

[Reverend]

Yes, I like it and I assume everyone likes it too. However, in my eforts to start getting back into 3D, I was scouring around for info regarding HDR when I stumbled upon an old email from John :

Just turning on soft shadows or HDR rendering basically doesn't make much difference unless you start authoring content around it, at which point you are penalizing the older cards.

I am going to leave the soft shadows part (which he lumps into the same category as HDR, in context of which he is speaking of... for the record, our email correspondence was about Raven, Quake4 and the D3 engine) for later study, but the point of this thread is to hopefully elicit responses regarding the difficulties game developers have to face when it comes to deciding to use HDR in the way it is supposed to be used (unlike the patched Far Cry and to a much lesser extent SCCT) while considering the artistic sacrifices (with HDR a main consideration in game desgin) that has to be made when we have a huge number of non-HDR-capable cards out there. I'm talking about the last bits of his quote above.

Will games with HDR rendering in mind from the start be very scarce, even when we have ATI and NV having such HDR-capable hardware now, due to the reason John stated? Should we (or reviewers) pay less attention, now, to it for this reason?

 

[Vadi]

I hope HDR becomes more usual because I want to drive out of tunnel and get blinded by the sun.

 

[sytaylor]

Like all things, the games have to be designed from the ground up to use it. Just plugging it into a game and being able to turn it off is one thing, but using it to affect everything within a given environment is another all together.

 

[Hanners]

I would imagine the introduction of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 will go some way to helping introduce HDR rendering to game titles as more of a standard 'built from the ground-up' feature.

I can't really see that we (the definition of 'we' being either as users or reviewers) should be ignoring HDR due to Carmack's point - The fact is that games are supporting this feature in some shape or form, it's something people like and want, and game titles that support it seem to be becoming more numerous pretty quickly. The fact that it's simply extra eye candy rather than directly relevant to the game content is neither here nor there to my mind.

 

[DemoCoder]

With good HDR and tone mapping, you *shouldn't* get blinded and you shouldn't get mega overexposure/underexposure everywhere. The whole point is to render the scene in its full dynamic range without losing precision and than map/compress it back into the dynamic range of your display.

If you are seeing overexposure everywhere and being "blinded", IMHO, your HDR algorithm sucks, OR you are going to for gimmicks, like the bloom gimmick.

I tend to view over/underexposure in scenes as a failure of the artist. In the real world, in the bright of day, I hardly ever experience overbright washouts as much as I've experienced in "HDR" games. Sure, they do happen sometimes in the real world, and you have to squint, or if you've been in a movie theater at noon. (or in the snow and go indoors). But the frequency in which this happens in games, and the *rapidity* of the eye adjustment is just wrong.

The goal of HDR should be to preserve precision in the presense of large dynamic range in your scene, and then when mapping to your display, preserve local contrast as much as possible.

 

[Vadi]

But the eyes have to adjust and since (unfortunately) HDR displays aren't used much you could fake it with a bloom.

edit: Democoder, you're right. The bloom could be achieved by a shader as well.

 

[Jawed]

The goal of HDR should be to preserve precision in the presense of large dynamic range in your scene, and then when mapping to your display, preserve local contrast as much as possible.

Agreed - e.g. bright lights shining off water should still look bright, bright explosions inside smoke should light up the smoke.

In SC:CT it seems that HDR lighting is partly simulating "ambient lighting" - so we also get into tricky territory.

To me HDR is just another eye-candy option.

It's also stuck in a questionable zone, like physics: if an HDR-capable lighting engine creates situations where a player can't see (whilst another can see - i.e. in multiplayer) then all players must have the same lighting engine running if it's going to affect gameplay.

Jawed

 

[lopri]

Just turning on soft shadows or HDR rendering basically doesn't make much difference unless you start authoring content around it, at which point you are penalizing the older cards.

The first part doesn't make any sense to me in that you need content to turn anything on. (Or is he separating an engine / a game?)

For the second part, I'll let the pictures say.

HDR ON
HDR OFF

Another ON
Another OFF

Giving an option doesn't hurt, either.

lop

 

[bloodbob]

With good HDR and tone mapping, you *shouldn't* get blinded and you shouldn't get mega overexposure/underexposure everywhere. The whole point is to render the scene in its full dynamic range without losing precision and than map/compress it back into the dynamic range of your display.

If you are seeing overexposure everywhere and being "blinded", IMHO, your HDR algorithm sucks, OR you are going to for gimmicks, like the bloom gimmick.

Not quite true they may make the artistic decisions to apply some delay to the adjust exposure level. But yeah well bloom is the most abused effect today.

 

[Subtlesnake]

It's also stuck in a questionable zone, like physics: if an HDR-capable lighting engine creates situations where a player can't see (whilst another can see - i.e. in multiplayer) then all players must have the same lighting engine running if it's going to affect gameplay.

In DoD:S there's a server setting so only those with HDR enabled may join the server.

 

[sonix666]

I do like HDR alot as it is used in DOD:Source. All colors and the environment look more vivid and lively thanks to it. Minor point is that the overexposure is overdone (no pun intended) and that the eye adjustment is too slow in my opinion.

What I would like to see from future games is that HDR is forced and not an option anymore, so it can actually be used for gameplay purposes. Like people in the sun not seeing people in dark areas anymore. No gamma 'hack' can save you anymore with HDR enabled then.

 

[Hubert]

The first part doesn't make any sense to me in that you need content to turn anything on. (Or is he separating an engine / a game?)

For the second part, I'll let the pictures say.

HDR ON
HDR OFF

Another ON
Another OFF

Giving an option doesn't hurt, either.

lop

I'd like to find out if HDR+AA is working for Age of Empires III/X1800 ... or if that HDR works at all on X1800. Guess I'm gonna do some googling.

 

[Reverend]

Nice to read what folks think HDR mean/should mean but that's going OT. But that's alright. Since we're on this track now, is HDR that important that it is a feature, perhaps the only feature thus far, that can shape how a game is made (and thus meant to be played, as envisioned by the developers)?

 

[AlNom]

I think it's important for getting rid of banding... e.g. Chaos Theory light on walls, Doom 3 shadows (caves in particular).

 

[tahrikmili]

I think it's important for getting rid of banding... e.g. Chaos Theory light on walls, Doom 3 shadows (caves in particular).

I thought this was an issue with volumetric shadows in general? Would HDR solve this?

 

[Xmas]

I thought this was an issue with volumetric shadows in general? Would HDR solve this?

Volumetric shadows don't produce banding, except when you use multiple slightly offset volumes to get soft shadows. The issue is mostly framebuffer color precision, 8 bits per channel simply aren't enough in many cases.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Don't we have 96bit-128bit framebuffers or am I mistaking that for something else?