Opinion about HDR.

[Schalldampfer]

Does anyone else think HDR worsens the image quality? I was looking at the HDR-render and non-HDR-render of AoE3 with 7800GTX HDR, but the one without HDR looks much more realistic.

[NsOmNiA91130]

Hmmm, in that game, yes...odd :eh?:

But I personally think Halo and HL2 both have great HDR, when manually added to HL2. Yes, if you haven't noticed, Halo uses some HDR effects. The Two Betrayals energy beam, if you look at it then look away at the metal next to it, you see the beam for a little bit.


Also, there was a site that had a download that added HDR effects to DirectX, does anyone have the site/download?

:santa:


By the way, I think this is what he's refering to.
http://nvidia.com/docs/IO/24708/hdr_full.jpg

[Schalldampfer]

Yes, thanks for the picture. It is what I'm referring to. Now that I look at it closer, it definitely looks worse with HDR.

[ninthebin]

I dont think you should blame HDR on that, there are different implementations of HDR lighting and some of the worst I see involve heavy use of the glare feature.

Now as something that pegs itself as this uber realistic lighting it would have you believe that anything you look at irl that is white / or some bright colour has a very large glow around it. I cant think of anything that isnt a light source itself that does that (and most light sources dont).

However, there are alot of other things that HDR does and if you look from game to game you will see it is implemented differently - Unreal3 engine HDR is the best implementation of it I have seen so far.

Like any graphical feature your going to just have to take it on a per-game basis, you cant say something sucks because some developers use it in a bad way. Also your looking at early implementation of it, you cant just say this is HDR every game is going to have true to life lighting from now on - its going to have to be improved upon

[JigPu]

Indeed. High use of bloom effects KILL a scene with otherwise good HDR. There are only a very few places where I see bloom naturally, and in almost all cases it is due to some diffusing objects in front of the light source (best example I can think of is looking at the sun through thin clouds -- the brightness is spread out [bloomed] from more than just the circle of the sun by a fair ammount). Many games don't seem to take this into account, and just throw on bloom because "it's HDR!!". There's nothing I can stand less than walls that glow, leaves that have highlights like mirrors, and needless loss of contrast.

JigPu

[Blackmage]

I Like HDR but there should a feature like in Far-Cry where you can change the lvl of HDR

[TheGreySpectre]

Depends on the game weather or not I like HDR