For rendered images, you don't need to expose different levels, as a single render done in 32 bit floating point usually contains enough information to cover th

For rendered images, you don't need to expose different levels, as a single render done in 32 bit floating point usually contains enough information to cover the visible dynamic range (and beyond). The improvement in Blender 2.79 is that it includes new transformations from the render color space to the display space. "Filmic" is just a name that has been in use lately to emphasise when such transformations mimic the behaviour of film, as opposed to for example tone mapping operators that mimic the behaviour of the human eye.