Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping

https://ventspace.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/games-look-bad-part-1-hdr-and-tone-mapping/

by megaman22 • 9 years ago

374 215 9 years ago

ventspace.wordpress.com

Some pretty bold and controversial (and subjective) statements, but I think the author makes a good case! Very interesting article.

kevlar1818• 9 years ago

"ventspace" indeed, but I agree--it's an interesting perspective.

Raphmedia• 9 years ago

I've always said (as a joke) that all game developers must have bad eyesight and dirty glasses.

Everything is blurry, you can't see far, you get dirt over your vision and there are glares and lens-flares all over.

What's worst is that this is done on purpose and on almost all the games. They must think that this is what real life look like.

turc1656• 9 years ago

I rarely play games but the most recent game I played was Alien: Isolation. It had been quite a while since I played a game before that so I was surprised to see a lot of these things on by default. Specifically, chromatic aberration. Why the hell would anyone add in a setting for that? I get that they were going for the Super8/VHS type of look but it's just really distracting. I forgot what the other settings were but I turned off a lot of those junk visual effects and then things looked beautiful.

potatolicious• 9 years ago

I also can't stand chromatic aberration in games - especially because it's so freakishly exaggerated compared to actual CA you would experience with old video/photo gear.

A lens that completely separates color channels is defective. It was defective in 1950 and it's defective today, so unless your goal was to replicate the look of hopelessly broken hardware, it's in no way "vintage".

Which I think goes more generally into my issue with game graphics - the taking of interesting effects (depth of field, chromatic aberration, lens flares, etc) and cranking it up to 11 for its own sake.

taw554• 9 years ago

Epic added chromatic aberation to the new Unreal Tournament at some point and the mob started sharpening their pitchforks. The reason given afterwards was that they think it’s important to break the “sterile” cg look by roughening the image slightly. I can see their point, games are at the point where they look “photoreal”, but not like a photo. I find the almost-but-not-quite realism jarring, personally, I even prefer playing older games usually because of it. so I can understand why devs try all kinds of tricks to alleviate it.

rm_-rf_slash• 9 years ago

In the past draw distances were much worse. But those restrictions spurred creativity. For example, the miserable draw distance of the PlayStation 1 resulted in the developers of Silent Hill to hide faraway rendering with a thick fog, which soon became an iconic theme for all Silent Hill games, even as the hardware far surpassed the need to keep it.

emodendroket• 9 years ago

Tons of games in that era had dense fog for that reason.

acchow• 9 years ago

They do this in many action movies (especially Michael Bay) as well. They believe the audience prefers these over-the-top effects. Based off the revenue of entire film franchises with millions of people returning for sequels of more of the same, I think they nailed what consumers want?

aerique• 9 years ago

The first thing I turn off in most games is Bloom. I actually do have glasses and the bloom effect in most games just looks like my glasses are greasy, no thanks.

Also, AA is another thing I generally turn off. It gives quite a performance boost and the resolution these days is high enough that I'm not bothered by it.

NathanKP• 9 years ago

A lot of the oversaturation problem can be attributed to bad displays. Think about early Instagram. Everyone used terrible super saturated filters on their photos because the early smart phone screens were so bad, and got washed out so easily in the sunlight. By overcompensating with filters you got a photo that looked good on a bad screen, even in sunny conditions.

The same was true of early games. Gamers love the bright colors of World of Warcraft for instance because displays were bad, and it was easier to watch bright colors for hours on end while gaming. Even today my modern TV looks pretty bad in the sunlight. As much as I love the muted colors of Breath of the Wild I have to admit that without closing my curtains its really hard to tell what's going on if a sunbeam is hitting the TV.

I think as gamer's screens get better we will start to see a transition away from exaggerated brightness and a trend toward more realism, just like Instagram has transitioned largely from a platform that overcompensated for bad smartphone screens to a #nofilter style.

npunt2• 9 years ago

I agree on your overall point. However in the case of Instagram, it was on iPhone years before Android, and iPhones generally have always had very good color accuracy. The early cameras, however, were crap, and filters helped immensely there. Garbage in, filtered garbage out.

jacobolus7• 9 years ago

Early iPhones and iPod Touches (for the first 3–4 years) had much smaller color gamut than the recent ones, not matching any standard. They also did no color management whatsoever, with the result that colors and color relationships of basically all content were always fairly dramatically wrong [at least to my eyes, as an amateur photographer and amateur graphic designer who cares a lot about precise color rendering].

Some app authors and content producers put in the effort to understand and specifically target the iPhone display, e.g. by gamut mapping their images beforehand. But I would guess that “some” to be significantly less than 1%. (Though I suppose you might consider the exaggerated-color Instagram filters we’re discussing here to be one sort of gamut mapping, targeting the relatively muted display.)

At some point Apple started making all of their devices very precisely hit the sRGB spec, so even though iOS still did no active color management, that made things a lot better, at the expense of making it impossible to accurately target colors at all iPhones for a while because different models had different gamuts. If you go look up the historical tech specs and display teardowns for different iPhone generations, I’m sure you can figure out exactly which version was the first to be close to sRGB. [More recently, I believe they now also do some color management, though I haven’t really investigated this in a few years.]

The first couple iPad mini versions also had a smaller-than-sRGB color gamut and no color management (I have one of these). I’m not sure about the earliest full-sized iPads.

Of course, this is all still better than Android where there is extreme fragmentation and every display looks slightly different.

gt_3• 9 years ago

Displays matter, but you may be missing the point. In short, low dynamic range means the display has less options to choose from. Better displays are very nice but they will always be limited by dynamic range and tone mapping. The problems of HDR are a pain in the ass, even for myself after working in film production for a decade and now doing CGI. But, when you do it all right (rarely can my projects afford to) it clicks. Games may never be able to in our lifetimes and the returns are diminishing. But, a great display with hacked dynamic range will hardly make a difference.

fulafel• 9 years ago

WoW was released the same year as LCD monitor sales first surpassed CRTs (2003). So in the early days of WoW, people actually got better colors than a few years later when most people had dumped CRTs for the relatively poor consumer LCD monitors of the day.

tomxor• 9 years ago

I was just a kid, but as far as I remember the transition to LCD brought worse colour not better. To be clear, i'm not talking about early professional colourists LCD displays that were £5000 or whatever. Surely everyone is familiar with those horrible TN panels in laptops... desktop LCDs used the same tech once.

pfranz5• 9 years ago

It was so sad in the mid 2000s trying to find a decent quality monitor for a decent price. You had to look very hard for a monitor that wasn't 6-bit dithered up to 8-bit.

I worked for an animation studio around that time. They stuck to their CRTs long after they were discontinued because they couldn't certify anything else--I think I remember hearing they paid something like $150 per monitor when they were still manufactured. The closest LCD was 10x as expensive.

They eventually switched to DreamColors when they were released in 2008.

fusiongyro• 9 years ago

I think this takeaway misses a significant point in the article: even a picture of that display will look better than it does on the display itself:

[W]hy does the LDR photo of your TV look so much better than the LDR tone map image? There’s another tone map in this chain which nobody thought to examine: Nikon’s.

The author isn't merely saying that games are too colorful. He's saying the colors are wrong from both an artistic perspective and from a utilitarian perspective. He's saying this is because the people making decisions about how color should be rendered are either ignorant of how to make the decision (copy-paste code) or make the decision without real awareness of how it will effect either of those properties.

chrisseaton10• 9 years ago

We would need 20 bits of just luminance to represent [the range 1,000,000:1

I don't understand this statement. Why do you need a certain number of bits to represent a large range? You can encode a range using any number of bits you want, but if you use fewer bits the resolution within may be lower.

Representing a large luminance range isn't a problem of resolution though is it? It's a problem of presenting that contrast ratio on a screen that is not capable of a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. If I represented the same luminance range with a thousand bits it doesn't do anything to solve the core problem, does it? So why does the number of bits matter?

Not a graphics programmer, so genuinely asking, not saying the article is wrong!

ttoinou11• 9 years ago

    It's a problem of presenting that contrast ratio on a screen
    that is not capable of a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1

If you have such a high contrast ratio, it also means you have discretized amount of light in such amount or more. Talking about the number of bits minimum needed indeed makes the assumption you are storing and manipulating light in a linear way (hypothesis not true for most 8 bpc rgb values).

sandofsky• 9 years ago

The larger the dynamic range, the more bits you need to represent the possible values in between.

Imagine a gradient that smoothly transitions from black to white. 8 bit color means only 256 shades of luminance, which would quickly show banding artifacts.

In fact, the entire reason we gamma encode images is because 256 is too small for even a low dynamic range monitor. Gamma encoding is a clever technique to give us more bits to represent shadows, which humans are more sensitive to than highlights.

ttoinou11• 9 years ago

I think O.P. understand that since he wrote "You can encode a range using any number of bits you want, but if you use fewer bits the resolution within may be lower.", applying a curve solves high dynamic range but lowers the resolution

chrisseaton10• 9 years ago

Right, but the contrast range 1:1,000,000 - that's a real range isn't it? Not an integral one? So why does it ideally need to be represented with a particular quantisation of 1,000,000 different states? I mean there's not 1,000,000 different values between the real numbers 1 and 1,000,000 are there? There's an infinite number. There's only 1,000,000 values (20 bits) if you decide to quantise on each integer. Why do you need to do that? Why not more? Or less? What's special about the integral values on the number line?

tripzilch10• 9 years ago

Imagine a gradient that smoothly transitions from black to white. 8 bit color means only 256 shades of luminance, which would quickly show banding artifacts.

Only if you don't dither. Which is like free bits of precision given today's monitors resolutions.

I don't disagree with the rest of your point (although I do believe that just because there's a 20-bit dynamic range one should represent it by 20 bits of precision that's an arbitrary choice) (not even the best choice, IMO).

Just want to emphasize that, a statement being made all over this thread, that "less bits = you gonna get banding", just means you're doing it wrong, thinking about it wrong, and might therefore even end up with banding if you had enough bits but wasted them at some point in the pipeline.

osteele• 9 years ago

Assume a linear scale, and assume the 1,000,000:1 range is between the highest luminance (1,000,000) to the lowest luminance (1) that isn't pure black.

(Pure black might be zero, but that's useless for computing a ratio, so it doesn't give you a resolution.)

Then you need 20 bits, because log_2 1e6 rounds up to 20 (equivalently, 2^20 <= 1,000,000 < 2^21).

If you used only 8 bits, the ratio between highest and lowest (non-zero) luminance would be only 256:1, or 1,000,000:3,906.

chrisseaton10• 9 years ago

20 bits lets you represent more values between n and 1,000,000 times n than 8 bits does, but it still doesn't let you represent them all, because these are real numbers and there an infinite number of values between n and 1,000,000 times n.

20 bits lets you represent all the values which are integral in base 10.... but so what? Why is the fact that a value is integral in a particular base make it the minimum resolution difference that you need to represent? Why do you need to quantise at that level? There is a luminance of 1.5 times n, isn't there? But 20 bits doesn't let me represent that. 21 bits would. See what I'm saying?

oppositelock2• 9 years ago

I've spent years working on rendering algorithms and game engines, so I guess I am a graphics programmer.

You are right, the final output dynamic range is limited by your output device, you can't circumvent that.

The 1,000,000:1 is the contrast ratio you might see on a sunny day, and represents the state of the world that your eyes are seeing.

Your eyes aren't capable of 1,000,000:1 contrast either, at least not globally across your field of vision, so we can play tricks in rendering to simulate what you would perceive with your limited eyeballs on a 1M:1 contrast ratio day, and this is what HDR rendering does.

Internally, the rendering code handles luminance well in excess of its ability to display on the final output device. All the game rendering happens internally in HDR, preserving this high level of contrast. The final steps of producing a displayable image are doing something to convert non-displayable "real" contrast ratios into post-processed simulation to fool you into perceiving high contrast scenes. This last part is subjective and artistic, since you are trying to figure out a way to show that high dynamic range scene. Common tricks played here are the light bloom from bright areas, the artificial amplification of darks areas, etc.

All these in-between rendering steps compose the result of multiple rendering passes into an image. Each pass which is blended with the results of a previous pass is subject to quantization error. The more passes you do (and modern games do lots), the more this quantization error accumulates, and leads to pretty ugly banding artifacts. You want to do your internal processing in the highest color resolution that you can, so that you only have to worry about the error of quantizing the 1M:1 scene into a 256:1 output device. You don't need the full 20 bits, and common practice is to use 16-bit S10E5 floats since hardware handles this quickly.

HDR televisions, while nicer than nothing, don't help you all that much. Displays have generally been 8-bit per channel, giving you 256 values distributed along a gamma curve which maps to a device with perhaps 3,000:1 contrast capability. HDR tv's give you 1024 values along a gamma curve that spans a higher range of contrast, but not all that much higher.

ttoinou11• 9 years ago

OK but that doesn't explain this sentence from the original blog post :

   In the real world, the total contrast ratio between the brightest highlights
   and darkest shadows during a sunny day is on the order of 1,000,000:1.
   We would need 20 bits of just luminance to represent those illumination ranges

zokier3• 9 years ago

I'll try to explain it the way I understand it, which might be completely wrong.

Imagine you have a lightbulb (producing let's say max 1000 units of light/brightness [which are two subtly different things]) connected to a dimmer that has for example 8 discrete levels. What would you say the dynamic range of this setup would be? Obviously measuring the contrast ratio from when the dimmer is in the zero setting (=light off) to max setting would result infinite contrast ratio/dynamic range. That is not very useful though, so the next best thing is to measure brightness difference from the lowest on setting ("1") to max, which gives you actually a reasonable number, in this scenario 125:1000 or 1:8. I hope this example was illuminating.

So I guess the idea is that bit depth fundamentally determines what is the minimum brightness representable without going to zero (where be dragons), and as such determines the max usable dynamic range.

zokier3• 9 years ago

I suppose more engineery explanation would be that we allocate "0" to represent everything below noise floor and whatever maximum value to represent saturation, which leaves us with [1,max-1] as the useful range for our signal. And the dynamic range is in respect to that, instead of [0,max]

chrisseaton10• 9 years ago

That still doesn't make any sense.

You could have a dimmer that goes from one level of lightness, up to another, with 8 steps in between. And you could have another dimmer that goes between exactly the same two levels of lightness. The same range. but with 1,000,000 steps in between. The range of the two dimmer switches is the same. They both go from the same minimum to the same maximum. Just the number of steps in between is different. The number of bits represents the number of steps.

Why is 1,000,000 steps the required number? 1,000,000 is just the number of integral factors in the range in base 10. But why is an integral factor more important than a fractional one? They could both be perceptible to a human. The range is the same in both cases, and the given explanation was given that the range was so high.

slavik813• 9 years ago

Yeah. There's definitely some unstated assumptions in that number. I think he is implying a linear scale, with the ability to represent details similar in magnitude to the minimum brightness. Without some assumptions like those, all it takes to represent that contrast is a single bit to choose between 1 and 1,000,000.

EDIT: I might as well link to the author's clarification. I missed it in the noise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15538738

It is a little odd. I don't think a linear, fixed-precision scale for luminance is used much, though I could be quite mistaken. I'm not very familiar with HDR. Still, I might as well explain a bit further...

Light accumulation is linear. If you have two lights, the amount of light reflecting off the surface is twice as much. Twice as many photons.

Human perception, however, is logorithmic. Something that is twice as bright in terms of photons emitted actually only looks a little brighter to the human eye. To get the same perceived brightness increment again, you need to double the photon count again.

With that in mind, what's the best numeric representation to use? Well, you want a simple way to add up the total amount of light from all sources. The amount of light may vary by orders of magnitude, but it's manageable because your need for precision scales with the magnitude you're dealing with. Basically, you want floating point.

In practice, a float for each color channel means 3 floats (96 bits) per pixel, which is a lot. So, while that might be used during calculations, it's probably stored compressed. For example, RGBE is a 32 bit per pixel format. You use 8 bits per color channel and multiply them all by 2^(E+128), where E is an 8 bit signed integer. It's kind of inaccurate for the dim channels if luminance varies significantly between colors, but the brightest one is probably going to overwhelm the other channels anyways.

BugsJustFindMe• 9 years ago

It's a bit mindblowing, but I'm pretty sure that every single person who has responded to you doesn't understand what you're asking and doesn't understand how to answer it.

The short answer is: You're right that it's wrong to say that you need 20 bits to cover the range. Because clearly you can cover the range with 10 bits or 100 bits by subdividing differently. More bits is better, but there's no rule of required multiplication of bits for fabricated metrics like integral brightness multiples. 20 bits is just required to cover the range with integers without skipping any, which is an entirely arbitrary decision.

The long answer is:

The reason you want more bits to represent the larger range is exactly as you say because one doesn't actually care about _range_ but rather about the utilization of increments within the range. Now I'm going to describe something that you clearly already intuit for completeness...

Say, for example, that you have only 3 steps (let's call them 1, 2, and 3) in your range instead of a million, but you want to represent the full range of darkest dark to brightest bright with those 3 steps (for simplicity you could also be thinking in black and white instead of color). Now, you take a picture of a normal indoor environment with some gentle indirect light, and maybe all of external values would be, on the million range, between 350k and 650k. If you linearly divide your range onto 3 steps, when you look at your resulting image you will have a flat solid block of 2s with no 1s or 3s at all. And yet your original setting had an absolutely massive 300k spread. But it didn't have significant brights or significant darks, because you were indoors with some indirect light and there was no fireball sun or deep cavern of despair in the image, so you didn't measure any differentiation in values.

So you decide to switch it up and go inside a dark cathedral with some wonderful stained glass windows (everyone loves cathedrals with stained glass when looking at HDR). This time you do the same thing, but instead of measuring all 2s, you measure all 1s with a chunk of all 3s for the sunlit windows, but no 2s at all.

So then you say, "What I should do is take some of those 3s and some of those 1s and pretend that they're actually 2s when differentiation is too high, and take some of those 2s and split them into 1s and 3s when differentiation is too low! That way I'll see more details, because there will be more efficient utilization of the segments of my available output spectrum!"

But _then_ you say, "Oh crap! I can't do that! I didn't actually capture the differences! I captured what I captured, and what I captured was the aforementioned terrible undifferentiated data!"

So the reason you want to be able to represent values on a _densely_ _segmented_ range is just so that you can differentiate things that are only slightly different in absolute overall term (think photon counts, I guess) because aesthetically those slight differences matter. It means you can do things like know when some of your 2s should become 1s and 3s, because the 2s aren't actually 2s anymore; they're a bunch of tiny fractional variations between 1.5 and 2.5, and that's data you can work with.

You can perform tone mapping with any number of bits. If record 10 increments instead of only 3, you can obviously convert those 10 down to 3 in a way that gives a better image than just starting with 3. And the more bits you have, the more linearly you can record the environment without losing the differentiability between things that are in absolute terms on a large scale very similar. And then you get to do fun things like add a light bloom effect around something that is _very_ bright compared to its surroundings without losing details within the very bright thing and without losing details within the very dark surroundings.

Having more representational bits just means you can tone map scenes that have really bright parts, really dark parts, and really medium parts without losing any of the details inside those parts.

ndh2• 9 years ago

I feel like this post does nothing in terms of educating readers. It all sounds very interesting, but I didn't learn anything. It alters between putting the blame on technical limitations and ignorance, so I would have liked to see a suggestion on how to address either of these.

aaron-lebo2• 9 years ago

It's a well-written and informative post, it deserves a little more praise than "does nothing in terms of educating readers".

What he is discussing is about aesthetics. There are two things at play here: the big studio business model relies on making blockbusters, so you pack together a few hundred devs and artists and try to pop out the biggest game you can. The other is that many devs are technically trained but not especially artistically educated. They have a limited understanding of lighting, color, framing a scene, etc.

Someone who has made some great criticisms of this as well as provided real solutions is Eskil Steenberg.

Aperson43212• 9 years ago

Link please to Eskil Steenbergs writings!

xigency3• 9 years ago

The article isn't very concise and is actually quite repetitive, it uses a bunch of jargon (without any description), and shifts blame around.

The topics are interesting and the opinions are there, but it certainly could be written better.

As a programmer who has done a small amount of work in graphics but hasn't worked in HDR rendering I have no idea what any of these are....

    film LUT

    color grading

    post process LUT color grade

...but I could write the linked-to shader. So who is he helping?

It alters between putting the blame on technical limitations and ignorance, so I would have liked to see a suggestion on how to address either of these.

I second this.

banachtarski2• 9 years ago

I thought it was a great post, but you're likely not the intended audience. At the very least, you probably need to understand HDR as a technique and the fundamentals of tone-mapping.

slavik813• 9 years ago

I thought there were a few very clear suggestions:

1. Pick your tone mapping early in the development process.

2. Look into the models are used by the camera / film industry, because they're clearly getting better results.

It's not a complete discussion, but as a student in computer graphics, I found it very informative. The title says Part 1, so presumably there will be more. The links were also all very good, too.

tripzilch10• 9 years ago

There's a few links to other articles that go into greater detail about that, and from there a whole rabbit-hole of more things :)

skybrian• 9 years ago

It makes sense for artists to concentrate on the details of how games look, and this article provides some good insight into that world.

But using stark moral terms for aesthetic judgements seems rather insular at best. When I think about games like Minecraft, Factorio, RimWorld, and so on, I wonder if maybe imitating movie-quality graphics is really as important as the author thinks it is? It's only a small part of the experience.

fhood• 9 years ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the author was protesting against the misuse of techniques for imitating movie quality graphics. He held up BOTW for not attempting such imitation.

jdlyga• 9 years ago

Half Life: The Lost Coast, this is all your fault!

coldcode• 9 years ago

I play World Of Tanks and tried every one of their mappings (forget what they call them). Even the one I can tolerate makes the tanks look like toys in a sandbox. Never feels like a real tank.

Kiro• 9 years ago

But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph.

Until graphics and animation are photorealistic I prefer my games to look videogamey. All those 4 screenshots are beautiful and I wouldn't want them any other way.

ttoinou11• 9 years ago

Related to that, colors of videos on the internet (and YouTube) are always kinda ugly and (I think) not very faithful of what the color artists intended to show...

I'm not sure but I think one of the issues are from the 16 - 235 channel remapping

nts34nhteo90• 9 years ago

It's probably more likely due to the fact that codecs for videos on YouTube tend to have lower resolution in the red and blue channels, which leads to very bad blocky artifacting around bright red and bright blue areas.

andrewf2• 9 years ago

I think everything else (Blu-Ray, DVD, cable TV) is using the same technique.

anentropic• 9 years ago

YouTube don't seem to handle colour profiles correctly

or there is some problem in the pipeline between uploading your video and it getting reproduced on screen by the player inside a web browser

videos exported from e.g. FCPX have colour profile attached and look right when played back in Quicktime desktop player, but the contrast always gets messed up when it comes back through YouTube

this is a separate issue from compression artefacts

vinistois2• 9 years ago

This article makes me appreciate the balance struck in GTA.

IMHO this type of scene is better than any of the examples shown in the article:

http://prod.hosted.cloud.rockstargames.com/ugc/gta5photo/YjB...

ttoinou11• 9 years ago

This picture is from a video game ?!

NoodleIncident• 9 years ago

Look at the white brick pillars in the background behind the car; they're exactly the same. Some other stuff like the soda bottle pops out as well. It does look nice though.

distantsounds• 9 years ago

Yes, there are mods out there that make GTA look like a photo-realistic adventure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cbL3HUqAJU

wandererer• 9 years ago

A more than four-year-old videogame, yes.

Promit5• 9 years ago

I liked this enough to merit an addition to the write-up. It's not perfect but I'm seeing some great GTA 5 shots that are very nicely balanced overall. Doubly interesting given the substantial age of the game.

andrewf2• 9 years ago

GTA's tone mapping is discussed at http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic... - including a couple of interesting "filmic tone mapping" links

jasonlotito• 9 years ago

From part 0, they make the claim and question:

So why the heck do most games look so bad?

And then they go on to pick a game that people specifically calling out for looking amazing: HZD.

In fact, the problem seems to be:

But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph.

To which I would reply: because they are video games. A photograph doesn't pass as film, and film doesn't pass as a photograph (though the nature of the two, film essentially being a lot of photographs). A video game must serve a different purpose than a photograph or a film. The players interact with the game, and therefore the intent and purpose is different. Glares on the screen aren't just there to add lens flare, but to make it harder to see because that's part of the challenge. It is harder to see, and you have to deal with that to overcome the challenge. That can be offset by keeping the sun to your back. Same with grime in the screen, or other such things. You want to highlight the things players need to react to, and in such a way that allow them to react quickly.

There is so much more, and yet so far this article is only referencing the pure look and seems to ignore the goals of the medium. I'll reserve judgement until I read the next parts of the articles, but until then, I can't help but wonder if this really matters.

HelloNurse• 9 years ago

Most games attempt to look realistic, and they fail. They definitely try to look like film, so comparing them to film is perfectly fair: it is an impossible standard that masochist, mannerist or hopeless game art directors have freely chosen for their projects and by which they deserve and demand to be judged.

Failure at realistic game graphics is so common, so taken for granted, that the scale of artistic accomplishment shifts downwards: if HZD looks only slightly bad, not constantly, and without disgusting the player too much, it's considered to have "amazing" graphics.

imcrs• 9 years ago

Artstyle is far far more important than graphical capability.

A game like Team Fortress 2, released in 2007 (!) looks so much better than many modern games because there is a coherence and style to the art. It's not "HD" for the sake of "HD."

We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible. But some restraint really works wonders.

theandrewbailey• 9 years ago

We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible.

It's been a while, but last I looked, it seemed that the temptation was to use ever muddier and desaturated visuals, with as much glare and shiny surfaces as possible.

subwayclub• 9 years ago

It comes and goes in phases according to the available technology. The first Quake was all muddy brown and gray. Quake 2 and Unreal both introduced color lighting and looked like a disco on Saturday night. Mid-2000s games added a lot of new lighting and post-processing effects but they had limitations causing harsh shadows and highlights, hence another round of gray/brown photorealism came through.

But in this decade things are finally feeling more evened out. Lighting models are sophisticated enough to allow for designs similar to a film set or photo shoot, and post-processing is getting past basic glows and filters and into a spectrum of quality/performance tradeoffs.

Of course, the games that don't aim for photorealism always age better. That's been the case since people started digitizing photographs for games.

bo1024• 9 years ago

I think this is a great point. It's why even cartoon-art games like Super Mario Brothers (1985) can age really well visually while games that put so much effort into graphics still age poorly.

If the main goal in a game is to make the graphics of yesterday look and feel obsolete, then that game will probably look and feel obsolete tomorrow...

WillKirkby• 9 years ago

https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining...

saturdaysaint• 9 years ago

TF2 has nice stylized models, but IMO the in game graphics are dated and not particularly special compared to newer genre examples like Overwatch, Splatoon, or Destiny.

intoverflow2• 9 years ago

I feel TF2 has a place in peoples hearts so it keeps getting wheeled out in this debate way more times than it's deserved these days (especially considering Valve compromised both the art direction and coherence in recent years).

All 3 examples here are excellent but I want to say I know a lot of people hate on Destiny but the art direction, environmental art, creature design is all magical in terms of tech and results. Honestly feels like concept art brought to life and anyone dismissing it and not even giving it a chance just are missing out on some seriously impressive visuals resting perfectly between realistic and stylistic.

pfranz5• 9 years ago

What's funny is that it looks like Valve lowered the polycount and quality of TF2, likely to accommodate the user-added stuff like hats--which seems in the spirit of stuff this article is upset about.

http://www.game-debate.com/news/23221/team-fortress-2-looks-...

gilbetron2• 9 years ago

The point of most video games is to be distinct, not to look like reality. Furthermore, they use high-contrast to help distinguish game elements. Games are not movies.

zanny• 9 years ago

Came looking for this. Unnatural contrast is good in games because it can help players distinguish different set pieces easier.

This is also why a lot of people prefer older FPS titles or games like TF2 used stylized profiles of the characters that stand out. In some games, you want interpretation of the game scene to be a challenge, but in most games, you want players to easily tell what they are looking at. Using high contrast / distinct models / distinct animations / color differentiation all help to achieve that.

desertrider12• 9 years ago

TF2 is very pretty and it’s clear that a lot of thought went into the color palettes and visual effects. The examples of bad effects in this article are the result of developers thinking “this is how games look”. I don’t think they got as far as planning how to guide the player’s attention.

cousin_it2• 9 years ago

Photos and film need to be readable too. I think gaming culture has poor taste in art for historical reasons. Here's some games that were called "gorgeous":

https://www.dualshockers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/COW-...

http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2014/01/22/capture9png-e9804c.png

http://www.gamesknit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dust-an-...

But there's a small minority of games that do look great:

http://cdn3-www.playstationlifestyle.net/assets/uploads/gall...

https://www.gamegrin.com/assets/games/hollow-knight/screensh...

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/...

AcerbicZero2• 9 years ago

As a fairly avid gamer, but there is a reason why my top 10 games are all fairly mediocre in the graphics department. High end Triple-AAA games with "Great" graphics usually lack depth in their mechanics, and while this isn't always true, it happens enough to keep me from enjoying them.

There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion.

megaman222• 9 years ago

There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion.

Those are all sandbox games that you effectively never stop playing. People tell me that there's a story and an endgame in Skyrim, but I've played a few hundred hours without doing any main-line quests past the first city. Mount&Blade I've sunk even more into - there isn't even the pretense of a story there, so you're pretty much on your own if you want to role-play, or just take in the enjoyment of riding around, hacking at people, and looting their corpses.

AcerbicZero2• 9 years ago

Those were just 3 of the more mainstream games with semi-limited graphics I could think of, but you're right they do share a sandbox style. Overwatch would be another example of a game where they put "good enough" graphics combined with much more refined mechanics (depending on who you ask, this last patch...eh) to achieve success

Anyway, the point I was going for the last thing we need is having them spend even more effort trying to make pretty looking but mediocre playing games.

eduren• 9 years ago

You may have already tried it, but from this comment I think you'd really enjoy The Witcher 3.

AceJohnny2• 9 years ago

I've been playing The Witcher 3 recently, and it actually really annoyed me with its HDR.

Yes, that sunset is pretty, but now I can't see anything else. I do not want to reproduce my frustrating commute into the sunset in a game.

Impossible• 9 years ago

I'll give you Mount and Blade... but Skyrim and especially GTAV were at the highend of graphics (and budget) for open world AAA games when they were released in 2011 and 2013. They also both had very long development cycles, the release of GTAIV was 2008 and Oblivion was 2006. Assuming similar development cycles, the next games in each series will be due in 2018 or 2019.

The bar for "great" graphics is going to change as new hardware comes out, but its a stretch to say those games were not pushing rendering on their target minspec systems (Xbox 360 and PS3) at the time of release, there aren't any examples of open world games that looked better than either of those games and ran on that hardware.

I know it's fun (although tired) to jump on any thread about game graphics and say "Graphics don't matter, games with great graphics don't have good gameplay!", but sharing knowledge about how to tune and implement postprocess to get better image quality isn't hurting gameplay quality and can lead to games both looking and playing better.

stordoff• 9 years ago

Mount and Blade, and to a lesser extent, Skyrim maybe, but I don't think GTAV fits here. It pushed its target hardware (originally PS3/Xbox 360) pretty far, to the point I wondered if it was going too far and was thus lacking in other areas (e.g. pedestrian/vehicle density).

jdright2• 9 years ago

I hate this idea that it should be photo realistic.

    > But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph.

Thanks, if they didn't looked at least "videogamey" I wouldn't have any interest. Stop this terrible trend of being a film!

rcthompson2• 9 years ago

The point is that the lack of photorealism in the given examples is not intentional, but happens because of a lack of proper attention to the HDR aspects of rendering. The article also gives examples of games that intentionally deviate from photorealism in order to achieve a specific effect.

jdright2• 9 years ago

HZD is intentional the way it is and it is perfectly good on my not-HDR tv. So he is missing the point.

HellDunkel5• 9 years ago

The author makes a point of Nintendo opting out of HDR but does not realize thats due to hardware limits not allowing deferred shading. The HDR techniques he does not like are all made possible by the use of deferred shading. These techniques may be sometimes used to overky stylize the look but it is undisputed they create more realistic images.

eropple• 9 years ago

Promit Roy has been being knowledgeable about graphics since before I was in college. I kind of doubt he "doesn't realize" it. The dude is really, really good.

And HDR doesn't really do anything to materially aid what he's calling out as well done in the first place. It's ancillary. It's not important. What's important is actual artistic intent and structure. That's what's lacking, along with a misunderstanding of why certain techniques work in film and don't when they are uncritically applied to games.

HellDunkel5• 9 years ago

I dont know what kind of HDR you refer to. My point was that for realistc rendering or physically based, whatever you might call it, a linear workflow (light calc in linearized space) is crucial. It is very important for the artist too if you aim at realism. Of course it brings challenged such as exposure correction and managing dyamics. These challenges are not yet fully solved but to say we ought to abandon HDR and go back to SRGB is at least questionable... we might as well go back to mode 13.

Dylan168073• 9 years ago

What kind of esoteric hardware can't do deferred shading? I really doubt that the switch lacks the ability, and I know it doesn't lack the processing power.

Promit5• 9 years ago

The Switch is perfectly capable of both deferred shading and HDR, which are themselves independent unrelated techniques. You can make an argument about whether or not those are the best implementation trade-offs for that hardware, taking performance and desired visuals into account. But there's nothing inherently preventing you from doing it on the Switch and it's a fairly capable GPU in its own right.

P.S. Unreal Engine reintroduced forward (non-deferred) rendering as an option last year because it's more efficient in VR.

HellDunkel5• 9 years ago

True, but deferred shading takes up extra performance, in most cases, thats why it is less used on lower end systems or vr where you need 120fps. i did not claim hdr or deferred was impossible on nintendo switch.

taw554• 9 years ago

This is false, HDR and deferred shading are two completely unrelated concepts.

A few months ago I hacked tonemapping straight into the ubershader of some foss Quake client, you don’t even need a seperate buffer to do these things.

HellDunkel5• 9 years ago

They are not as separate. A deferred shading pipeline would make little sense if it was operating purely in LDR. Tonemapping in foward shading can be done but makes a lot more sense to do as a post step. If you ask a photographer about tone mapping he/she would tell you about a very different concept (but is more likely to turn away in disgust)... and that could not be done by color-mapping 1 fragment at a time.

Zelizz• 9 years ago

Deferred rendering is on the way out, in my opinion. With the advent of clustered forward rendering, we can get many, many lights without having to do multiple passes, cram everything in the gbuffer, use a single shading model for the whole scene, and be limited to screen-space anti-aliasing like FXAA and TSAA.

HellDunkel5• 9 years ago

Please note there is s difference between deferred rendering and deferred shading. The latter is here to stay and all major game engines have made it their main technique. (vr excluded)

bitwize• 9 years ago

The first game to feature (pseudo) HDR was actually Shadow of the Colossus, and it's still a beautiful game despite its washed out colors, super high contrast, and "that dynamic exposure adjustment effect nobody likes". It may have been the template for most or all of the "bad" games in the article.

These effects are beautiful in Colossus because they were chosen for artistic reasons and they are artistically used. The lack of color saturation complements the game's lush, but somehow bleak and foreboding, natural environment. The extreme contrast highlights the differences between the dark and dank indoor environments of the various ruins and temples, and the raw untamed wilderness that lies outside them. And the dynamic exposure adjustment effect is, vaguely, supposed to parallel the main character's eyes adjusting as he moves from one kind of environment to another. (Either that or just "hey look, we can do this on a PS2!")

It's kinda like how the parallax line-scrolling effects in Shadow of the Beast were amazing in that particular game at that particular time, but take the same effect in a shitty game -- like, say, Bubsy -- and it just looks awful and tiresome.

rcthompson2• 9 years ago

Everyone commenting here that they don't care about photorealism in their games is missing the point. The example games (and movie) given at the start of the article lack an appearance of photorealism not because they were going for something else, but because they either didn't pay enough attention to the HDR rendering, or else they didn't have the expertise to do it right. The article also gives examples of games that intentionally went with a non-photorealistic look to achieve a specific effect. So the point is not "these games look bad because they aren't photorealistic", it's "these games look bad because their HDR rendering is bad".

I don't know enough myself about HDR rendering to have an opinion on whether the author is right or wrong about any of this, but people arguing that the author is wrong because games shouldn't look photorealistic are attacking a straw man.

gt_3• 9 years ago

I can confirm everything except gamer audience concerns. I don’t game. I have worked in film production camera department, post-production and now CGI. Color grading and compositing in particular are not specialties of mine, but I know the systems well, and I can confirm the technical critique in the text. This author does an impressive job of cutting out the bull and getting to the bare issues.

zeta01342• 9 years ago

As a gamer, I can also confirm that I tend to have a tough time with dark areas in a lot of mainstream games. If I can get the game to realize that I'm trying to look at them (usually by getting the bright sky out of my viewport so it does the "HDR adjust" fake thing) then the darks come out of the contrast floor and I can suddenly make out the detail.

The problem with the game doing fake-HDR is that while it looks great in trailers (or... at the very least, looks like the engine is doing something fancy with lighting, "great"-ness notwithstanding) it doesn't match what my real eyes would do in a situation. Unlike film, a video game doesn't have control over where I'm going to point the camera. I do. And sometimes, I need to see over that ridge, but the detail in the shadows is important too, and the game camera can't see what I'm actually looking at (with my eyes) and adjust accordingly.

Breath of the Wild is a great counter example, because it doesn't really try to do the HDR adjust thing at all. It doesn't really need to; sure its daylight scenes are a bit washed out, but real daylight is a bit washed out too. My eyes adjust, just like they would outside, and I can actually see what I'm doing. That's important! With games, tempting though it is to control the camera effects just like you would when shooting film, you can't control the player's actions. It's usually better for gameplay to mellow out the effects, so the player can focus on their actions without being distracted by the 'pretty' effects.

ancientworldnow2• 9 years ago

I am a colorist and I also want to add that the technical details check out - minus the Red One being better than film. It was most decidedly worse in every way - but was almost as good which was the important thing. I recently was going back and look at One and MX footage and couldn't believe how terrible it has held up while the Alexa sensor is still great today as are the 16 and 35 scans I work with.

That aside, I found the discussion about the misuse of ACES particularly interesting. It's like the completely misunderstood the tool and how it's intended to be used (which isn't uncommon with the tech unfortunately).

gilbetron2• 9 years ago

Or, you know, the developers were trying to balance far more factors than what has to happen with a movie. Multiple platforms, not only high FPS but maintaining that FPS with disparate scene complexity, old hardware vs new, support a variety of camera distances and fov, highlighting game elements so that objects don't blend together, handling in-game cutscenes as well as actual play, having an asset pipeline that doesn't destroy your budget, etc. Not to mention players that are random monkeys that like to try to do bizarre things within your game.

I guarantee game developers and game artists know a hell of a lot about HDR and color and lighting, and all kinds of things related to it, probably more than most people involved with movies. They just come at it from a different viewpoint - that of real-time rendering.

kllrnohj3• 9 years ago

The author doesn't appear to have bothered to investigate or honestly ask WHY games are the way they are, though. They are just blindly attacking an entire industry on basically the claim that the entire industry is stupid.

But the industry isn't stupid, and some of the "over-contrasty garbage" is intentional to help people rapid identify the things that they need to identify. Being able to quickly spot the things that you need to play the game are more important than sensible tone maps and contrast curves.

This is not a medium you observe like film & paintings are, it's a medium you interact with, and rapidly at that. Approaching the visuals with the same perspective as something you only observe is a fundamentally flawed approach.

This article is packed with baseless assertions, unfounded claims, and offhanded but not investigated technical limitations. Hell, right after saying "partly due to technical limitations" the author proceeds to throw out a "nobody in the game industry has an understanding of film chemistry" snark. The author doesn't even bother to elaborate on the technical limitations that they remarked on, opting instead to just hurl insults for no reason.

zamalek2• 9 years ago

I was hoping that the author would go into how to do tone mapping correctly.

ask WHY games are the way they are, though.

To add to your point, the main reason for "bad HDR" in FPS games is for simulating eye adaptation. Screens don't have 1,000,000:1 constrast ratio and can't shine as bright as the sun (we wouldn't want them to). This means that games are forced to approximate this effect - inevitably resulting in shortcomings.

Furthermore, game development is a race against time. You have milliseconds to render the scene and apply tone mapping. It may very well be mathematically possible to create automated tone mapping that would make a cinematographer proud, but can you make an algorithm that completes in less than 1 millisecond? I doubt it.

To my point, there are mods on PC that replace the tone mapper (I think ReShade does this) and they absolutely destroy your framerate - however the results are absolutely gorgeous if you know what you're doing.

slavik813• 9 years ago

I recognize the author of this post just from the logo on his site. He worked in the industry and has spent years sharing his knowledge on gamedev.net. This is not an attack on the industry. He is speaking to his peers.

[...] some of the "over-contrasty garbage" is intentional to help people rapid identify the things that they need to identify. Being able to quickly spot the things that you need to play the game are more important than sensible tone maps and contrast curves.

Is this speculation or were you involved in these discussions? Or, maybe a GDC talk? For all I know, you could the lead graphics programmer for Naughty Dog, in which case I'd totally take your word for it.

And, actually, I really would like to hear more specific criticisms. As much as I respect Promit, he absolutely could be wrong and a detailed breakdown from someone who knows better would be informative.

sebastos2• 9 years ago

Whatever reason modern games have for looking like shit, it's not good enough. The end effect is that they look like shit.

Maybe a little snark is good. These big studios have been pumping out bigger and louder games for a decade, and each one is more soulless than the last. There's a reason Minecraft took off the way it did. It's because it was a return to the visually appealing age when pixel colors were in some sense manually selected, resulting in a pleasant palette. I can say without a hint of irony that I prefer the look and feel of the original Doom to any modern blockbuster game.

Are you here to tell me that Minecraft and Doom are paragons of bad gameplay?

pfranz5• 9 years ago

The game industry definitely follows inward looking trends. For a long time every game was grey or brown and lacked contrast. More recently they all seem to use the same look/LUTs.

I worked in animated feature films and had similar critiques about the lighting and look. I felt like they lit everything like a well exposed photograph and were afraid of letting things fall off into dark or light (part of that could have been poor simulation of the toe or head of the film curve).

Then, when Pixar did Wall-e (2008) they hired a well known cinematographer, Roger Deakins, as a consultant. DreamWorks also hired him for How to Train Your Dragon (2010). I think that was a big change and both of their studios approached how CG movies look.

andrewguenther• 9 years ago

Maybe I just play too many video games, but I don't think any of those "terrible" screenshots look bad. If anything, the foggy image from Breath of the Wild looks worse than any of them. What am I missing? What is supposed to be bad about these?

pls2halp• 9 years ago

The attempts at photorealism brings them barely into the uncanny valley, but overdone HDR pulls them firmly into the bottom of the valley. To think they look bad, you have to be the sort of person who didn't like Tarkin's CGI in Rogue One.

djur• 9 years ago

Some of it is just one's personal taste, but I would say that a practical difference is that I find it difficult to pick out details in the images called out as "bad". My eyes feel overwhelmed by the huge shifts in contrast and it's hard to visually identify objects in the very dark areas and the very shiny, bright areas.

I also get a very strange sense of depth from those images -- it feels like everything is either very close or very far away, without having a sense of how far apart objects actually are.

In comparison, in the BOTW screenshot, I can clearly identify objects of interest (a shrine, a tower, a volcano, a river, a bridge) and have a sense of where they are compared to each other and myself.

That said, I feel like it's not a completely fair comparison -- the "bad" images all seem to have the camera in a dark area looking out and up into a bright area, while the BOTW camera is on top of an exposed mountaintop looking out into the sunset. The lighting is going to look a lot different regardless. However, the HZD image after _that_ is really quite garish and harder to justify.

itronitron• 9 years ago

That particular BotW screenshot isn't entirely representative, what is remarkable about BotW is that going for a non-photorealistic aesthetic makes the game more compelling as there are fewer details competing for your visual attention. I highly recommend playing or viewing it at 1080p on a very large screen.

gilrain• 9 years ago

It's amazing how many commenters seem to be embarrassing themselves by trying to be the first to wildly misunderstand the problems being discussed and reduce them to trite memes. You're not even disagreeing with the thrust of the article in your vehement objections.

Yes, this indicates the article was poorly written. I advise you move on rather than reflexively attack nothing.

reiichiroh• 9 years ago

HDR is the new "next-gen Brown!"

lanius• 9 years ago

I would guess this isn't a priority for the industry because gamers themselves don't care. Case in point: gaming monitors. Gaming monitors advertise high-refresh rates and low input lag but rarely color quality. What percentage of gamers use wide gamut monitors or even perform color calibration?

ancientworldnow2• 9 years ago

FWIW, I'm a colorist and have very expensive color critical monitors and calibration probes. For GUI monitors I've started recommending gaming panels for suites that don't want to invest in professional graphics displays. Once calibrated these monitors are surprisingly accurate and hold the calibration well (at least as good as professional displays many times more expensive - though still a far cry from color critical displays). The expanded refresh rates are a nice bonus for eye relief as well.

puzzlingcaptcha• 9 years ago

As HDR panels used for TVs 'trickle down' to PC displays the HDR part of the problem will solve itself. Perhaps then people will focus more on color grading (although I suspect over-saturation will always be a staple in some genres).

_qbjt• 9 years ago

This can really be attributed to a general rule of thumb in game development: aesthetics are more important than graphics.

hasenj• 9 years ago

The resident evil screenshot looks incredibly realistic. I thought that was a real photograph placed there to contrast reality with games. Until I read the paragraph below it.

mozumder• 9 years ago

Some films are absolutely just as contrast-y as these HDR images. In particular, Fujiilm RDP-III slide film. See: https://www.flickr.com/groups/provia100f/pool/

But yes, Arri does have a beautiful soft look along with Fuji digital cameras, and plenty of film stocks do as well. It all depends on the tastes. Gamers aren't going for soft reality. A lot of hard-edged gamers are going to go for the high-contrast, desaturated ExTreMe ChaLLeNgE look.

pasta3• 9 years ago

Isn't this just a matter of taste? There are a lot of tone mapping algorithms everybody know about. So it's just a matter of taste choosing the one you like.

Edit: As far as I know render engines use the complete dynamic range until the last step which converts it to a 16 bit output range. So maybe games can let the user decide which tone mapping algorithm to use.

pasta3• 9 years ago

*24 bit output range

taw554• 9 years ago

While on the subject of graphics in games...

Another pet peeve of mine: ambient occlusion (crude GI approximation) and especially SSAO (crude approximation of a crude approximation).

Corners don’t look like that: http://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/

(Ambient occlusion proper and in moderation I think looks fine, but most games really overdo it.)

sillysaurus33• 9 years ago

Latch on to that idea -- corners don't look like that -- and follow it to its logical conclusion: no one knows how to make any fully-simulated video look indistinguishable from reality.

That's a huge leap, but it has the benefit of being true.

(To be precise: no one has ever created fully-simulated video capable of fooling human observers anywhere close to 50% of the time. The video has to be reasonably long (>30sec) and complex. But in a double-blind test, almost any nature video will handily beat any synthetic video.)

taw554• 9 years ago

My main problem with it isn’t that it’s unrealistic per se, just that it looks bad on static geometry. But SSAO is typically sold as a “realism” feature.

sdwisely2• 9 years ago

(To be precise: no one has ever created fully-simulated video capable of fooling human observers anywhere close to 50% of the time. The video has to be reasonably long (>30sec) and complex. But in a double-blind test, almost any nature video will handily beat any synthetic video.)

Out of curiosity is this from something? it sounds like you're citing something and for realtime I'd agree. I think people are fooled everyday by raytraced images (movie cg etc).

no one knows how to make any fully-simulated video look indistinguishable from reality.

I'd say we know how to do it, we don't know how to do it fast.

zimpenfish• 9 years ago

no one knows how to make any fully-simulated video look indistinguishable from reality.

Does that need qualifying with "in a reasonable time frame and/or budget"? Or is it really just that bad?

tripzilch10• 9 years ago

While not video, check out any IKEA-catalogue of the past couple of years, it's roughly 50/50 photo versus CGI and you can't tell which is which. They got their photo-crew CGI training and vice versa.

pizza234• 9 years ago

Does anybody know what's the technical ground for some games to have dark areas turn brighter (typically, of a squashed, dark, green/blue) instead of darker?

I remember one game ("Through the woods") which had this problem in a very aggressive form. It was very visible while playing, but it's hard to find a screenshot.

Here, for example, the house on the left (but also the cabin in the center:

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/368430/ss_74ec0...

What's the exact issue? Is it a tone mapping problem? I'm curious, because I have a rather good monitor, and some dark games (eg. "Alien: Isolation") are equally dark, but don't look as bad as this.

pasta3• 9 years ago

Looks like environment lighting to me.

I'm not sure this is the case in your example, but a lot of render engines use an environment light when rays don't detect collision.

So the camera is looking at the wall of the house and bounces into oblivion. Therefore the environment values are used. And since the stones of the house are gray a lot of environment light bounces back to the camera. But when the camera is looking at the trees a lot of rays bounce to leaves and the ground returning almost no light back to the camera.

I would even say that your example looks realistic (although way to dark).

mstade• 9 years ago

Compelling article, but I can’t help but feel the author hasn’t appreciated some of these games on an HDR capable screen. They call out Battlefield 1 and Horizon Zero Dawn, both of which look stunning in HDR mode on an LG OLED screen. BF1 only got HDR mode implemented in a patch fairly recently, and before then was unplayable on an OLED with its deep blacks, it was a contrast fest with no luminance range what so ever. After the patch however, that all changed.

I’ve never played HZD in anything but HDR mode (in fact, I bought the game specifically to test HDR) so admittedly I don’t know the difference there. All I know is in HDR mode, HZD is one of the prettiest games I’ve ever played, with fantastic colors and brilliant transitions in luminance.

HDR I feel is one of those things you just can’t appreciate in screenshots or comparison videos. You have to get a good screen (I can’t see myself coming back from OLED, it’s – no pun intended – a game changer) capable of HDR and just appreciate it for yourself, it’s really something.

I’m sure it’ll be even better as technology matures and game developers become more familiar with it, and as well the market penetration of HDR capable screens increase, but to say they don’t know what they’re doing now seems a bit of a stretch. Especially if all you have to go on are screenshots.

Bodell• 9 years ago

Honestly, I'm tired of the race for games to just 'look' better. Most of the time it seems as if it is a detriment to actual gameplay and frame rate.

I would definitely prefer games to look bad (or preferably stylized in a way that works for the game) over having a somewhat realistic looking game ( only when your standing still so the frame rate doesn't dip) and terrible mechanics and a bad story.

Far to much information and talk about making games look better and very little about how to make games actually better. Modern gaming to me has become the same as clicking the X on hundreds of popups from your windows 98 machine. Just with somewhat realistic looking ugly faces instead of X's.

Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping

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