8 ms·

Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

189 points by uncircle 1y ago

gampleman 1y ago
[2017]
dartharva 1y ago
It's not just games, it's regular day-to-day UI too. I'm using an Acer 185Hz VRR HDR10 Gaming monitor.. on Eco mode with HDR disabled. Everything just looks better with HDR turned off for some reason I can't explain.
- SomeoneOnTheWeb 1y ago
  That's normal. For HDR to look good, you need a monitor that hits approximately 1000 nits in brightness. Your monitor only hits 250, which is completely insufficient to display HDR content. This is one of the stupid things with many monitors, showing HDR at 250 nits is worse than showing no HDR at all. So no matter what you do, 99% of HDR content will look bad on your screen.
  - geraldwhen 1y ago
    I have a C3 OLED and everything also looks better with HDR off. Games are just truly awful in making scenes completely in viewable, even when the HDR areas, the blacks and whites, have interactive elements in them you need to see and know about.
    - zapzupnz 1y ago
      I have a C4 OLED and I thought what you said was also true for me until I figured out what settings I needed to change on my TV to match my console (Nintendo Switch 2). Had to turn on HGiG, manually adjust the peak brightness level on the console itself, and suddenly things looked great. Not that many games on the console that take advantage of it, mind you. More testing needed.
  - Tade0 1y ago
    I agree that 250 nits is too low, but my monitor clocks in at 400 and HDR already looks better, if only thanks to the increased colour channel resolution - particularly visible in highlights, clouds etc. Where there previously was just a single colour blob I now can observe details impossible to display with just eight bits per channel. Interestingly my laptop's display reaches 500 nits and that is already painfully high outside of midday hours. My phone goes to 875 and I find that only to be useful outside in the summer sun.
    - SomeoneOnTheWeb 1y ago
      The difference is between SDR and HDR. Going full blast with a full image at 500 nits or having an image averaging 200 nits with only peaks at 500 are two vastly différence things.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    > For HDR to look good, you need a monitor that hits approximately 1000 nits in brightness. I disagree. The wide color gamut is -for me- a huge thing about HDR. My VA monitor provides ~300 nits of brightness and I've been quite happy with the games that didn't phone in their HDR implementation. Plus, any non-trash HDR monitor will tell the computer it's attached to what its maximum possible brightness is, so the software running on that computer can adjust its renderer accordingly.
    - dartharva 1y ago
      > Plus, any non-trash HDR monitor will tell the computer it's attached to what its maximum possible brightness is, so the software running on that computer can adjust its renderer accordingly. My monitor does do that, but alas the software itself (Windows 10) wasn't good enough to adjust stuff correctly. It did made the decision to switch to ArchLinux easier by being one less thing I'll be missing
- tobyhinloopen 1y ago
  Unless it's a MINI LED or OLED display, it simply doesn't have the contrast to properly render a lot of what makes HDR... HDR. Calibrate the display with HDR enabled for a better SDR response.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    VA screens have pretty damn good contrast, and OLED monitors tend to have low peak (and sometimes even spot!) brightness. A while back, I tried an OLED gaming monitor that was widely reviewed as being very good. While it was somewhat better than the VA monitor that I've been using for years, it was nowhere near 1,500 USD good. I could see someone coming from an IPS or TN screen being very impressed with it, though.
    - tobyhinloopen 1y ago
      VA screens have terrible black smearing though. I also bought an OLED display and returned it because it was just very dim. I own a miniled display that peaks at 1000cd full screen (it has a fan to handle the heat) and I'm still looking for an OLED replacement.
      - simoncion 1y ago
        > VA screens have terrible black smearing though. It depends on the monitor and the colors involved in the transition. My VA monitor (a BenQ EW3270U) has limited-but-noticeable smearing between certain dark colors. Blacks and dark colors against mid-brightness and brighter are just fine. [0] It's my understanding that this monitor has quite-a-bit-less-bad color smearing than most VA panels, and has roughly the same -er- amount of slow transitions (just with a different set of colors) as my Asus PA246 IPS monitor. I play a variety of video games, so I see both muddily-dark and high-contrast areas. I'm fairly pleased with the performance of the panel they dropped into this monitor. Honestly, the off-axis color and contrast shifting is way more noticeable than the color smearing... and folks who sit down in front of this monitor don't tend to notice those shifts. (Plus, if you play 3D video games released within the last five years, crap like temporal-anti-aliasing and its bastard children add so much smearing and rendering artifacts that it becomes quite challenging to determine what visual artifacts are actual pixels commanded to be on the screen by the renderer, and what might from too-slow flipping of the pixels in the screen. Is this a good state of affairs? Definitely not. But it's the one we find ourselves in.) [0] It's entirely unlike the OLED screen in the Nexus 5a which has incredible smearing between black and a huge array of dark-to-medium-brightness colors. This smearing reduces as you increase the brightness of the screen, but doesn't go away entirely until you get to like the top quarter of the screen's brightness. (If you have one of these phones, drop your screen brightness to the bottom quarter and browse through back issues of the Gunnerkrigg Court webcomic. There are PLENTY of black-on-X color combinations to get a really obvious demonstration of the problem.)
- whywhywhywhy 1y ago
  Something is poorly implemented with Windows UI on HDR, and Macbooks it all looks fine then HDR content just appears brighter, I think the rest of the UI becomes duller too at that point but on windows it feels like running HDR on the Windows desktop means the whole screen looks dull, least it does on my 5K HDR Dell. Not sure if I'm missing a setting, but I end up having to manually turn HDR on before playing a game and off after.
craxmerax 1y ago
When HDR is implemented properly, and you have a proper HDR display, it's such a transformative experience! Most games, however, don't have good HDR implementations. And for whatever reason HDR on Windows is still awful in 2025.
- rag-hav 1y ago
  Any examples of good HDR in games?
  - simoncion 1y ago
    Here's my list from a couple of months ago, along with some related commentary: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43986463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43986463>
  - WithinReason 1y ago
    I liked the talos principle 2 inside the pyramid after reducing the gamma a bit on a WOLED display
can16358p 1y ago
HDR is GREAT! Everyone trying to implement HDR + tone mapping excessively just for the sake of it and exaggerating it to show-off (just like those oversaturated Samsung phone screens) is not.
- nottorp 1y ago
  So were 3d movies until they stopped filming in 3d and started adding pointless effects in postprocessing :)
- nwallin 1y ago
  Yeah. There've been a laundry list of innovations over the years that people will invent, show how it improves how a scene looks, and then for the next few years everyone turns it up to 11 and it looks like shit. Bloom, SSAO, lens flare, film grain, vignetting, DoF. After a while people turn it back down to like a 4 and it improves things.
  - rthrfrd 1y ago
    Yes, like everything: Nylon might be my favourite example of us never being able to use innovation in moderation.
refactor_master 1y ago
This is [...] a series examining techniques used in game graphics and how those techniques fail to deliver a visually appealing end result All I see is opinions though. And the internet is full of them. You just have to Google "why does this game look so ...". At least if the author had compared the search stats of "good/bad/beautiful/washed out" it would've carried some weight. The GTA 5 screenshot is a terrible example. It looks like a cheap, dead, video game environment, reminding me how far we've come.
- phoronixrly 1y ago
  I think the author's list of "ugly" games is missing Witcher III, Hellblade, God of War (2018), Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate... And we need some examples of good, cinematic, artful tone mapping, like any scene of a Hollywood movie set in Mexico...
  - tmtvl 1y ago
    In my experience Elden Ring looks better when you turn the graphics quality down. Baldur's Gate isn't particularly ugly for a '98 game. And I agree that it would be nice to have some positive examples. I think there were a bunch of SNES games which did it well, but that may just be nostalgia.
    - Nicook 1y ago
      given the rest of the games listed I assume he means baldurs gate 3. Many younger people out themselves by just calling it baldurs gate.
    - lII1lIlI11ll 1y ago
      > Baldur's Gate isn't particularly ugly for a '98 game. I remember it looked beautiful. Especially comparing to early 3D games of that era.
  - HelloUsername 1y ago
    > tone mapping, like any scene of a Hollywood movie set in Mexico That's not tone mapping, but color grading
0_____0 1y ago
Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622
pyrale 1y ago
> But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph. Or even a reasonably good offline render. Or a painting. They are instantly recognizable as video games, because only video games try to pass off these trashy contrast curves as aesthetically pleasing. Author is fumbling the difference between aesthetics and realism. Videogames feeling videogamey? What a travesty.
fabian2k 1y ago
For Horizon Zero Dawn I'd argue that the colors are clearly an artistic choice. They're not going for realistic colors at all. And the original game and its sequel do look very, very good. There do seem to be plenty of issues around HDR for sure, in some games I had to intentionally disable HDR on my PS5 because it just looked bad on my setup.
paulluuk 1y ago
I feel like this is very much a personal preference thing. They even called out Horizon Zero Dawn for looking very bad, and Zelda for looking very good.. while in my opinion the exact opposite is true.
- abhpro 1y ago
  The author is more pointing out that these games don't look realistic. Look at the foreground of the HZD shot - why is it almost black in daylight?
  - phoronixrly 1y ago
    Zelda looks realistic to them?
    - whizzter 1y ago
      No, the author posits that Zelda explicitly goes for artistry and ignores any pretense of realism (that then falls flat on it's face when using an over-contrasting tone-map like in the HZD screenshot).
      - phoronixrly 1y ago
        Oh, I see. I disagree that the original HZD had a pretense of realism though. The remastered version does and well illustrates the uncanny-ness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlWK_ELBW08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlWK_ELBW08 . The outrageous god rays, bloom and lens flare in the remaster compensate for that because you can't actually see anything due to them blinding you...
      - jan_Inkepa 1y ago
        The problem I personally have with the Zelda example given is that it looks really bland to me - the landscape looks really washed out - the author says "Somebody would paint this. It’s artistic.", but I don't think anyone would paint with such bleached-out colours.
mg 1y ago
I really don't know what to think of HDR. I have yet to get any benefit out of it. I disable it everywhere I can. In Instagram for example. When it is turned on (the default) every now and then I get some crazy glaring image in my feed that hurts. Maybe it is because I don't play games? Is HDR useful anywhere outside of games?
- simoncion 1y ago
  > ...I get some crazy glaring image in my feed that hurts. Are you using an Apple machine to do your browsing? I have heard that Apple has (for some damn reason) decided to do this sort of crap with HDR-pictures-in-an-otherwise-SDR-document. It's nuts. This doesn't happen to me on Windows, and -because I use xorg- I've no idea what happens on Linux.
uncircle 1y ago
I found this video to visualise what tone mapping is trying to achieve, and why "photorealism" is hard to achieve in computer graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AT7H4GGrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AT7H4GGrA And I indirectly taught me how to use the exposure feature in my iPhone camera (when you tap a point in the picture). It's so that you choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process, using your eyes which have a much greater dynamic range than a CCD sensor. TIL.
- akomtu 1y ago
  I've heard a good point that our eyes have, in fact, a boring 1:100 range of brightness. Eyes can rapidly adjust, but the real game changer is our ability to create an image in our video memory, which has an unlimited brightness range. Eyes give us maybe a 2d uint8 framebuffer, but our mind creates and updates a float32 3d buffer. This is why this experience cannot be reproduced on a screen.
  - hnuser123456 1y ago
    If our eyes can only see 100:1, why is OLED taking off? LCD has been claiming 1000:1 for decades
    - __alexs 1y ago
      In my case it's because the motion clarity of OLED is excellent.
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      Because of fast & per-pixel level light control. Though this is true even if we completely ignore whether human eyes actually manifest a 100:1 auto-adapting dynamic range window.
- amarshall 1y ago
  > the exposure feature in my iPhone camera…choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process No, it uses that to set the physical exposure via the shutter speed and ISO (iPhones have a fixed aperture, so that cannot be changed). It literally says this in the video you linked. This is not tone mapping. Tone mapping in a way may also happen afterwards to convert from the wider dynamic range of the sensor if the output format has a more limited dynamic range.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
One game that actually puts a lot of effort into this is X-plane. They use physics based rendering and with recent updates they have done quite a bit of work on this (clouds, atmosphere, natural looking colors and shadows, HDR, etc. There's a stark contrast here with MS Flight Simulator which looks great but maybe a bit too pretty. It's certainly very pleasing to look at but not necessarily realistic. One thing with flying is that visibility isn't necessarily that good and a big part of using flight simulators professionally is actually learning to fly when the visibility is absolutely terrible. What's the relevance of scenery if visibility is at the legal minimums? You see the ground shortly before you land, a few feet in front of you. And even under better conditions, things are hazy and flat (both in color and depth). A crisp, high contrast, saturated view is pretty but not what a pilot deals with. A real problem for pilots is actually spotting where the airport is. Which is surprisingly hard even when the weather is nice and sunny. An interesting HDR challenge with cockpits is that the light level inside and outside are miles apart. When flying in the real world, your eyes compensate for this when you focus on the instruments or look outside. But technically any screenshot that features a bright outside and clearly legible instruments at the same time is not very realistic but also kind of necessary. You need to do some HDR trickery to make that work. Poor readability of instruments is something X-plane addressed in one of their recent updates. It was technically correct but not that readable. X-plane rendering has made some big improvements with all this during the v12 release over the last three years.
perching_aix 1y ago
Note that this post is of course about high internal dynamic range specifically and the necessary tonemapping that then follows for presenting an SDR image, not about how modern games do actual HDR (but then that should be pretty similar on a high level to the extent I understand anyways). > 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. And this is of course silly. In the real world you can have complete darkness, at which point dynamic range shoots up to infinity. > A typical screen can show 8 (curved to 600:1 or so). Not entirely sure about this either, monitors have been pulling 1000:1 and 2000:1 dynamic ranges since forever, even back in 2017 when this article was written, but maybe I just never looked too deep into it.
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  The static contrast ratio (1000:1+) you mention is different from effective perceived contrast after tone mapping - manufacturers' specs measure black-to-white in ideal conditions, while tone mapping algorithms must compress real-world luminance ranges (millions:1) into that limited display range while preserving perceptual detail.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    I'm not entirely sure how that's relevant to what I was saying.
viktorcode 1y ago
Please watch this for yet another take on the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j68UW21Nx6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j68UW21Nx6g The points are: game graphics is indeed suffering, but the problem is not being unlike films and photos, it's the opposite. The games should stop using film industry produced tone mapping curves and instead create their own, making a clean break. Personally, I agree with the video.
markus_zhang 1y ago
One big issue I never understood is why do we need photorealism in games at all. They seem to benefit card manufacturers and graphic programmers, but other than that I feel it has nothing to do — and in fact may have negative impact on game quality.
- bre1010 1y ago
  Completely agree. People lament the death of the RTS genre for all kinds of reasons but I think the biggest one was the early-2000s switch to 3D. Performance considerations meant you have way fewer units. The only exception was that Supreme Commander was somehow able to get around this, but suffered heavily from the second big problem with 3D RTSes: the tiny unit models are so much harder to tell apart in 3D compared to 2D. The RTS switch to 3D was a mistake and I think RTSes will continue to fail until their developers realize what actually makes them fun is actively hindered by this technology.
  - nntwozz 1y ago
    I'm on the gameplay > graphics bandwagon too but StarCraft II and Age of Empires IV are proof that 3D is not the problem.
- smt88 1y ago
  I agree it doesn't benefit most games, but it's still genuinely amazing to see sometimes. I suspect part of the challenge with making a hit game with last-gen graphics (like Breath of the Wild) is that you need actual artists to make it look good.
- eviks 1y ago
  How do you understand other human desires? That is, what is different about the desire to match reality in other mediums is different from other more understandable desires?
- senko 1y ago
  This, in a nutshell, is why Nintendo is doing so well. Their hardware is underpowered, games look like cheap cartoons, but the effort spent into gameplay more than compensates.
altairprime 1y ago
It apparently took Mozilla a couple decades to allow displays to present #ff0000 as sRGB red correctly mapped into the display’s LUT, rather than as (100%, 0%, 0%) in the display’s native LUT, which is why for several years anyone using Firefox on a ProPhoto or Adobe RGB or, later, DCI-P3 or BT.2020 display would get eye-searing colors from the web that made you flinch and develop a migraine. It was, I assume, decided that the improper tone mapping curve gave their version of the web more lifelike color saturation than other browsers — at least on their majority platform Windows, which lacked simple and reasonable color management for non-professional users until Windows 11. So Firefox looked brighter, flashier on every shitty Windows display in the world, and since displays were barely capable of better than sRGB, that was good. Unfortunately, this also meant that Firefox gave eyestrain headaches to every design professional in the world, because our pro color displays had so much more eye-stabbing color and brightness capability than everyone else’s. It sucked, we looked up the hidden preference that could have been flipped to render color correctly at any time, and it was tolerable. Then Apple standardized DCI-P3 laptop displays on their phones and tablets, where WebKit did the right thing — and on laptops and desktops, where Firefox did not. Safari wasn’t very good yet back then to earn conversions, though certainly it is now, and when people tried to switch from Firefox the colors looked washed out and bland next to that native display punch. So everyone thought that Apple’s displays were too bright whenever they surfed the web and suffered through a bad LUT experience — literally, Firefox was jamming 100% phosphor brightness into monitors well in excess of sRGB’s specified luminosity range — by dimming their displays and complaining about Apple. And one day, Chrome showed up; faster, lighter, and most critically, not migraine inducing. The first two advantages drew people in; the third made them feel better physically. Designers, professionals, everyone who already had wide color monitors and then also students; would have eventually discovered (perhaps without ever realizing it!) that with Chrome (and with Safari, if they’d put up with it), they didn’t have to dim their monitors, because color wasn’t forcibly oversaturated on phosphors that could, at minimum, emit 50% higher nits than the old sRGB-era displays. The web didn’t cause eye strain and headaches anymore. Firefox must have lost an entire generation of students in a year flat — along with the everyone in web design, photography, and marketing that could possibly switch. Sure, Chrome was slightly better at the time; but once people got used to normal sRGB colors again, they couldn’t switch back to Firefox without everything being garish and bright, and so if they wished to leave Chrome they’d exit to Safari or Opera instead. I assume that the only reason Firefox finally fixed this was that CSS forcibly engraved into the color v3 specification a few years ago that, unless otherwise hinted, #ff0000 is in the sRGB color space and must be rendered as such. Which would have left them no room to argue; and so Firefox finally, far too late to regain its lost web designer proponents, switched the default. As the article describes, Nintendo understands this lesson fully, and chose to ship Zelda with artistic color that renders beautifully assuming any crap TV display, rather than going for the contrast- and saturation-maximizing overtones of the paired combination of brighter- and more-saturated- than sRGB that TV manufacturers call HDR. One need only look to a Best Buy TV wall to understand: every TV is blowing out the maximum saturation and brightness possible, all peacocks with their plumage flashing as brightly as possible, in the hopes of attracting another purchase. Nintendo’s behaviors suck in a lot of ways, but their artistic output understands perfectly how to be beautiful and compelling without resorting to the Firefox approach. (Incidentally, this is also why any site using #rrggbb looks last-century when embedded in, or shown next to, one designed using CSS color(..) clauses. It isn’t anything obvious, but once you know how to see it, it’s like the difference between 18-bit 256color ANSI and 24-bit truecolor ANSI. They’re not RGB hex codes; they’re sRGB hex codes.)
Jyaif 1y ago
After reading this article I feel like I learned nothing about what makes HDR good or bad.
serd 1y ago
From an interview with legendary Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi and Yukihito Morikawa of MuuMuu: "Do these playworlds really need to be that photorealistic, I wonder? I actually consider it more of a minus if the graphics are too realistic." https://shmuplations.com/yokoi/ https://shmuplations.com/yokoi/
freilanzer 1y ago
I cannot be the only who barely notices this in games.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
sgarland 1y ago
This is apparently an unpopular opinion, but in many games (fantasy RPGs come to mind), I like the fake look. It helps it look other-worldly, IMO. I think for something like Flight Sim, I’d prefer photorealism, but otherwise I’m fine with it looking like, well, a video game. It might be a generational thing, too; I was born in the late 80s, and my formative years were spent playing cartoonish games like Commander Keen, Command & Conquer, etc.
sgarland 1y ago
> The exposure level is also noticeably lower, which actually leaves room for better mid-tone saturation. Decades ago, when I shot film, I remember discovering that I really liked how photos looked when underexposed by half a stop or so. I never knew why (and I wasn’t developing my own film, so I’ve no idea what the processor may have been doing), but I wonder if this was a contributing factor.
ChoGGi 1y ago
I don't want realistic looking games, I want pretty looking games. Look at movies that go all in on realism, can't see anything, can't hear anything. That's terrible.
- happymellon 1y ago
  The fact you can't hear anything has nothing to do with realism. It's lazyness. https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/ https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...
PaulHoule 1y ago
I was excited when I first heard about HDR but when I saw the implementation I thought: gee, they're going to screw up both the SDR and the HDR and that seems to be the case quite often. Going from SD -> HD your picture got better although it often got stretched out, but it's not so clear the HDR version of a movie is really going to be an improvement.
fidotron 1y ago
All of the "bad" examples look like they're playing on a PC with poorly set gamma curves. Play on a TV where the curves are setup properly because TV people actually care about color reproduction.
atoav 1y ago
As someone who worked a lot in realistic VFX I concur with the observation that nearly no game is doing tone mapping right and my guess to why that is always has been the fact that doing it right is just very complex. There are many, many things artists need to do correctly, many of which have no idea of the whole pipeline. Let's say someone creates a scene with a tree in it. What is the correct brightness, saturation and gamma of that trees texture? And if that isn't correct, how could the lighting artist correctly set the light? And if the texture and the light is wrong the correct tone lmap will look like shit. My experience is that you need to do everything right for a good tonemap to look realistically, and that means working like a scientist and having an idea of the underlying physical formulae and the way it has been implemented digitally. And that is sadly something not many productions appear to pull off. But if you pull it off everything pops into place. The added complication with games is of course that you can't just oprimize the light for one money shot, it needs to look good from all directions. And that means it is hard to make it look as good as a film shot, because that risks making it look like crap from other directions which studios aren't willing to risk. The dragon in The Hobbit isn't just about the tonemapping, it is at least as much (if not more so) a lighting issue. But the two can influence each other in a bad way.
os2warpman 1y ago
Why does everything (in big-budget video games) look shiny and wet? If it is an attempt at realism, reality is not constantly shiny and wet. If it a subjective artistic choice, it is objectively wrong and ugly. Is there an expectation that everything look shiny and wet to make it seem more "dynamic"? Is it an artists' meme, like the Wilhelm Scream in cinematic sound design?
- mfro 1y ago
  Overuse of reflective surfaces are the same kind of fad we saw with bloom in the mid 2000s and early 2010s. Now that SSR everywhere is technicaly feasible gamedevs want to use them everywhere. I think this started 5-10 years ago and RTX has renewed the meme, unfortunately.
- schmidtleonard 1y ago
  Specular highlights are cheap (frame time and artist time) and beautiful when done right, so everyone tries to do them and they get overcooked. There is a secondary problem in big budget games where modeling work gets farmed out leading to selection for "what looks good in the preview pic." In the preview pic, the asset artist gets to choose background/scene/lighting, and it's an easy trick to choose them to make the specular highlights pop. The person doing integration buys the asset, drops it in wildly different background/scene/lighting, and now the specular highlights are overcooked because the final scene wasn't chosen for the specific purpose of leveraging specular highlights. tl;dr artists ship the org chart too
- perching_aix 1y ago
  The common wisdom is that it's more difficult to make sunny and dry environments look pretty than it is overcast and wet ones. I tend to agree with this based on the end results I've seen over the many years.
  - e3bc54b2 1y ago
    That's what I used to think too.. but Spec Ops: The Line is entirely based in desert, even has a shot of sarin horror and while 'pretty' isn't the word I'd use, it is stunning.
dahart 1y ago
I truly don’t understand the author’s opinions about contrast here. The RE7 image is the only one here that looks ‘realistic’, and at a glance could be mistaken for a photograph, and he says it’s got way too much contrast. No other image here comes anywhere even close, definitely not Zelda nor GTA5. Personally I think the whole problem with the first 5 images is that they don’t have enough contrast, and they have too much detail. The color handling isn’t the only reason they don’t look realistic, but making sure every single pixel’s nicely exposed and that nothing gets too dark or too bright is allowing to let all the CG fakeness show through. One of the reasons the RE7 image looks better is you can’t clearly see every single thing in the image. If you take photographs outside and the sun is in the shot, you will absolutely get some blown out white and some foreground blacks, and that’s realism. The CG here is trying too hard to squeeze all the color into the visible range. To my eyes, it’s too flat and too low contrast, not too high contrast.
- kevingadd 1y ago
  One problem with photorealism is a lot of players are on bad displays, or in bad viewing environments. Games often take this into account in their visual direction so that they will be more legible in these different environments. It used to be even worse when designing a game for say the Gameboy Advance or original Nintendo DS where you knew the screen wasn't backlit or wasn't particularly bright so your images needed to be bright and colorful. Even now, a Nintendo Switch game might be played on the bus. For big budget games the solution for this is typically to have brightness calibration when the game first boots up, but the game itself still needs to be designed adaptively so that it's not Too Dark or Too Bright at critical points, otherwise the playability of the title is jeopardized. This runs counter to a goal of photorealism.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    I made thermal prints (receipt printer) of concept art from Pokémon Sun and Moon for the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, like this one https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 and found they did really well because the art was designed to look good on bad screens and poor viewing conditions. I think of it in terms of Ansel Adam's Zone theory in that the ideal image is (1) legible if you quantize it to 11 tones of grey (looks OK printed in the newspaper), but (2) has meaningful detail in most or all of those zones. I'm kinda disappointed that the Nintendo 3DS version didn't use the stereo effects but they would have had to decided if her hair forms a sheet or a cone.
the__alchemist 1y ago
Hmm. I like the author's main point in many video games doing this unrealistically, but there are a few sticking points that are relevant from the past few years: - The omission of discussing HDR monitors, and how you can't really capture that on a screenshot. This is a game changer, especially with new games and monitors. - The omissions of discussing Unreal5 games that have come out in the past few years. (e.g. Talos principle 2, Hellblade 2, Stalker 2) - Not enough examples of games that do it well, with A/B comparisons of similar settings - The Nintendo screenshot as an example of doing things right isn't working for me. Another interesting example of lighting done well is Kingdome Come Deliverance 2. The details don't look nearly as nice as, e.g. UE5 game and it unfortunately doesn't support monitor HDR, but it has very realistic looking lighting and scenes.
- cubefox 1y ago
  The article is from 2017.
  - the__alchemist 1y ago
    Oh wow. I wonder what the author thinks of the new trends! I bet he or she would be pleasantly surprised by some of them.
    - cubefox 1y ago
      Yeah, since then there were some games with very natural looking contrast and colors, perhaps most notably Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Or, years later, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (2025), which you already mentioned. As a negative example: as far as I can tell, Horizon Forbidden West (2022) mostly doubled down on the exaggerated color contrast he criticized in the predecessor.
      - the__alchemist 1y ago
        Concur on Forbidden West having the same problem as HZD that the author mentioned. I remember thinking about the dark/indoor areas with accent lighting, and vegetation in particular compared to similar scenes in Talos Principle 2. (Similar release dates) HZD wasn't in the same league as Talos.
esafak 1y ago
The screenshot of "Zelda: Breath of the Wild " the author holds up as an exemplar looks unrealistically tone mapped to me. The "bad" screenshots in the lede look more natural and pleasing. Not realistic -- they're too stylized for my taste -- but the Zelda screenshot is simply unrealistic in a different direction.
- the__alchemist 1y ago
  This is an example of a phenomenon I've seen many times on the internet: - Person has a critique of certain media (books, authors, games etc). They are valid critiques. - You ask what the person thinks is an example of media that doesn't have this problem, or the media they like. - The examples given are not in the same league, or do the one thing better, and many other aspects poorly.
turnsout 1y ago
This article is just misinformed. Source: I’ve been working with color space conversion, HDR tone mapping, gamut mapping and “film look” for 20 years. It’s clear from their critique of the first screenshots that their problem is not with HDR, but contrast levels. Contrast is a color grading decision totally separate from HDR tonemapping. There’s then a digression about RED and Arri that is incorrect. Even their earliest cameras shot RAW and could be color matched against each other. Then they assert that tone mapping is hampered by being a 1D curve, but this is more or less exactly how film works. AAA games often come up with their own curves rather than using stock curves like Hable or ACES, and I would assume that they’re often combined with 3D LUTs for “look” in order to reduce lookups. The author is right about digital still cameras doing a very good job mapping the HDR sensor data to SDR images like JPEGs. The big camera companies have to balance “accuracy” and making the image “pleasing,” and that’s what photographers commonly call their “color science.” Really good gamut mapping is part of that secret sauce. However, part of what looks pleasing is that these are high contrast transforms, which is exactly what the author seems to not like. They say “we don’t have the technical capability to run real film industry LUTs in the correct color spaces,” which is just factually incorrect. Color grading software and AAA games use the same GPUs and shader languages. A full ACES workflow would be overkill (not too heavy, just unnecessarily flexible) for a game, because you can do you full-on cinema color grading on your game and then bake it into a 3D LUT that very accurately captures the look. The author then shows a screenshot of Breath of the Wild, which I’m nearly positive uses a global tonemap—it just might not do a lot of dynamic exposure adjustment. Then they evaluate a few more images before praising a Forza image for being low contrast, which again, has nothing to do with HDR and everything to do with color grading. Ultimately, the author is right that this is about aesthetics. Unfortunately, there’s no accounting for taste. But a game’s “look” is far more involved than just the use of HDR or tone mapping.
jpadkins 1y ago
Path of Exiles 2 is a good recent example of a game that does a pretty good job of contrast and tone (staying true to the dark, gritty theme that is going for). I think it was smart of the devs to keep all the high contrast to effects and lighting.
SirMaster 1y ago
This seems pretty irrelevant now. This article is from 2017 which is before we had proper real HDR support in Windows 10 and much better HDR support now in Windows 11. And before we had OLED gaming monitors which can actually now display good HDR at 1000+ nits. This was definitely during a transitional phase with mostly fake HDR techniques that needed tone-mapping. Now we have real HDR that doesn't need tone-mapping, or only a small amount of tone-mapping above the display peak nits point.
- theshackleford 1y ago
  > And before we had OLED gaming monitors which can actually now display good HDR at 1000+ nits. It’s worth pointing out these monitors for the most part can not sustain it or achieve it at anything other than the smallest possible window sizes, such as the 1-3% window sizes at best. > Now we have real HDR that doesn't need tone-mapping, or only a small amount of tone-mapping above the display peak nits point. For the reasons outlined above (and other) tone mapping is still heavily required. It’s worth noting that OLED TVs do a significantly better job at displaying high nits in both percentage of the display and in sustaining it. It’s my hope the monitors eventually catch up because I waited a long time for it to become monitor sized.
  - SirMaster 1y ago
    > It’s worth pointing out these monitors for the most part can not sustain it or achieve it at anything other than the smallest possible window sizes, such as the 1-3% window sizes at best. Sure, but the parts of the image that are anywhere near 1000 nits are usually quite small and are things like muzzle flashes or light fixtures or centers of explosions, or magic effects etc. https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/rog-swift-oled-pg27aqdm https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/rog-swift-oled-p... This is OLED gaming monitor that came out 2 years ago measures 904 nits on a 10% sustained white window.
    - theshackleford 1y ago
      > Sure, but the parts of the image that are anywhere near 1000 nits are usually quite small and are things like muzzle flashes or light fixtures or centers of explosions, or magic effects etc. Sure, but plenty of things are bright enough in combination at varying window sizes that combined the panels have to drop down significantly. So you might get 1000 nits for a muzzle flash but ~200nits at best for a “bright sunny day.” The problem is way too many people (I’m not suggesting you) don’t realise this and just think they are “getting 1000nits!” >https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/rog-swift-oled-pg27aqdm https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/rog-swift-oled-p... Yes, I own this display and it’s one of the better ones for brightness which is why I grabbed it. However even on the latest firmware, It has a bunch of issues including with colours in HDR unfortunately. It also has incredibly aggressive ABL. Still a great display, but with more limitations compared to the TVs than I’d like still. They’ll get there though hopefully in few more generations.
pflenker 1y ago
I skipped the text and looked at the images and was unable to understand if they were supposed to be bad or good examples. I liked them. Then k read through the text and learned that they are supposed to be bad examples. But why though? I suspect that either I am not good at this kind of thing, or this is a purist thing, like „don’t put pineapples on pizza because they don’t do that in Italy“. I don’t want games to look realistic. A rainy day outside looks gray and drab, there is nothing wrong with rainy days in games not looking like the real thing, but awesome and full of contrasts.
- CupricTea 1y ago
  >I don’t want games to look realistic. A rainy day outside looks gray and drab, there is nothing wrong with rainy days in games not looking like the real thing, but awesome and full of contrasts. In photography and cinematography contrast and color curves are near ubiquitously modified artistically to evoke a certain feeling. So even without 3D renderings added colors are adjusted for aesthetic over raw realism.
- diob 1y ago
  Reminds me of how movies / shows these days have gotten so dark, when in the past even dark scenes were often lit in such a way as to show details.
- chihuahua 1y ago
  I totally agree. The example pictures in the article look fine. I don't know what the author wants, but perhaps it's some kind of industry insider view similar to where "true artists' make movies that are so dark you can't see anything, and the dialog is quiet mumbling and the sound effects are ear-shattering. Perhaps there's an equivalent to that in games.
  - kllrnohj 1y ago
    > I don't know what the author wants If only they had written an article about what they wanted... > but perhaps it's some kind of industry insider view similar to where "true artists' make movies that are so dark you can't see anything Nope, it's not that.
otikik 1y ago
The article lacks some examples of what "done right" means. It points to some videogames that "do it terribly" (they look ok to me? not photorealistic, but not every videogame has to be like that?) but it does not show how "a correct" version of each image would be. Just says "it looks obviously bad". Sorry but I don't see it. I'm fine with videogames looking videogamey.
- armonster 1y ago
  The article shows 5 images from games showing it done poorly, and 4 images from games showing it done well. A fifth image of it done well was added in an edit.
  - otikik 1y ago
    It doesn’t matter if the images are different. To the author it might be super obvious why some are good and others aren’t. To me they all look good.
int0x29 1y ago
I suspect contrast in a lot of the games he's skewering is high because they are shootery type games where players need too see things, understand them, and react to them quickly Also I don't necessarily see a need to make everything look like physical film.
gloosx 1y ago
All these massive studios with their grand budgets can't make a game which is not looking like a cartoon. A real masterpiece of modern graphics is a game made by two brothers called "Bodycam"
codeulike 1y ago
Previously posted in 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
qoez 1y ago
Am I taking crazy pills or are the blacks actually crushed in zelda but not crushed in zero dawn (opposite to what's stated).
lawlessone 1y ago
slightly related but a lot of newer games have weird colour filtering and post processing effects now that drive me nuts
ooterness 1y ago
The opposite extreme: physics-based rendering that models the entire optical chain of a film camera, including the emulsion layers. https://youtu.be/YE9rEQAGpLw?feature=shared https://youtu.be/YE9rEQAGpLw?feature=shared
meinersbur 1y ago
Researchers trained a deep learning network on photos to make GTA5 more realistic-looking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 I was surprised that most of it is is just tone mapping. It looks too green-ish to me, needing some white balancing, but realistic. I think Video games are intentionally over-saturated and contrasty to make them look better, just as paintings are[1]. I took many screenshots in Horizon Zero Dawn that would be look bland if it was realistic like the modfified GTA5 footage above[2]. You also don't want animation movies[3] with realistic tone mapping. But for a horror game you would do exactly that, it's about immersion (or you would never be frightened), not beauty. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/1ix7ms2/my_hzd_oilpainting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/1ix7ms2/my_hzd_oil... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/x97gi1/this_game_is_a_visual_masterpiece/ https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/x97gi1/this_game_i... [3] https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0892769/mediaviewer/rm2841021440/?ref_=tt_ov_m_sm https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0892769/mediaviewer/rm284102...
- saltcured 1y ago
  That's pretty funny... at least the narrator seems to reference the problem. It is trying to normalize it to some model of reality extracted from photos of Germany. I think the stock game footage may be too contrasty but has much more realistic coloring for how Southern California actually looks in the summer. Chalk one up for needing reality filters to include a notion of locale-specific and season-specific references?

189 points by uncircle 1y ago

[2017]

It's not just games, it's regular day-to-day UI too. I'm using an Acer 185Hz VRR HDR10 Gaming monitor.. on Eco mode with HDR disabled. Everything just looks better with HDR turned off for some reason I can't explain.

SomeoneOnTheWeb 1y ago
That's normal. For HDR to look good, you need a monitor that hits approximately 1000 nits in brightness. Your monitor only hits 250, which is completely insufficient to display HDR content. This is one of the stupid things with many monitors, showing HDR at 250 nits is worse than showing no HDR at all. So no matter what you do, 99% of HDR content will look bad on your screen.
- geraldwhen 1y ago
  I have a C3 OLED and everything also looks better with HDR off. Games are just truly awful in making scenes completely in viewable, even when the HDR areas, the blacks and whites, have interactive elements in them you need to see and know about.
  - zapzupnz 1y ago
    I have a C4 OLED and I thought what you said was also true for me until I figured out what settings I needed to change on my TV to match my console (Nintendo Switch 2). Had to turn on HGiG, manually adjust the peak brightness level on the console itself, and suddenly things looked great. Not that many games on the console that take advantage of it, mind you. More testing needed.
- Tade0 1y ago
  I agree that 250 nits is too low, but my monitor clocks in at 400 and HDR already looks better, if only thanks to the increased colour channel resolution - particularly visible in highlights, clouds etc. Where there previously was just a single colour blob I now can observe details impossible to display with just eight bits per channel. Interestingly my laptop's display reaches 500 nits and that is already painfully high outside of midday hours. My phone goes to 875 and I find that only to be useful outside in the summer sun.
  - SomeoneOnTheWeb 1y ago
    The difference is between SDR and HDR. Going full blast with a full image at 500 nits or having an image averaging 200 nits with only peaks at 500 are two vastly différence things.
- simoncion 1y ago
  > For HDR to look good, you need a monitor that hits approximately 1000 nits in brightness. I disagree. The wide color gamut is -for me- a huge thing about HDR. My VA monitor provides ~300 nits of brightness and I've been quite happy with the games that didn't phone in their HDR implementation. Plus, any non-trash HDR monitor will tell the computer it's attached to what its maximum possible brightness is, so the software running on that computer can adjust its renderer accordingly.
  - dartharva 1y ago
    > Plus, any non-trash HDR monitor will tell the computer it's attached to what its maximum possible brightness is, so the software running on that computer can adjust its renderer accordingly. My monitor does do that, but alas the software itself (Windows 10) wasn't good enough to adjust stuff correctly. It did made the decision to switch to ArchLinux easier by being one less thing I'll be missing
tobyhinloopen 1y ago
Unless it's a MINI LED or OLED display, it simply doesn't have the contrast to properly render a lot of what makes HDR... HDR. Calibrate the display with HDR enabled for a better SDR response.
- simoncion 1y ago
  VA screens have pretty damn good contrast, and OLED monitors tend to have low peak (and sometimes even spot!) brightness. A while back, I tried an OLED gaming monitor that was widely reviewed as being very good. While it was somewhat better than the VA monitor that I've been using for years, it was nowhere near 1,500 USD good. I could see someone coming from an IPS or TN screen being very impressed with it, though.
  - tobyhinloopen 1y ago
    VA screens have terrible black smearing though. I also bought an OLED display and returned it because it was just very dim. I own a miniled display that peaks at 1000cd full screen (it has a fan to handle the heat) and I'm still looking for an OLED replacement.
    - simoncion 1y ago
      > VA screens have terrible black smearing though. It depends on the monitor and the colors involved in the transition. My VA monitor (a BenQ EW3270U) has limited-but-noticeable smearing between certain dark colors. Blacks and dark colors against mid-brightness and brighter are just fine. [0] It's my understanding that this monitor has quite-a-bit-less-bad color smearing than most VA panels, and has roughly the same -er- amount of slow transitions (just with a different set of colors) as my Asus PA246 IPS monitor. I play a variety of video games, so I see both muddily-dark and high-contrast areas. I'm fairly pleased with the performance of the panel they dropped into this monitor. Honestly, the off-axis color and contrast shifting is way more noticeable than the color smearing... and folks who sit down in front of this monitor don't tend to notice those shifts. (Plus, if you play 3D video games released within the last five years, crap like temporal-anti-aliasing and its bastard children add so much smearing and rendering artifacts that it becomes quite challenging to determine what visual artifacts are actual pixels commanded to be on the screen by the renderer, and what might from too-slow flipping of the pixels in the screen. Is this a good state of affairs? Definitely not. But it's the one we find ourselves in.) [0] It's entirely unlike the OLED screen in the Nexus 5a which has incredible smearing between black and a huge array of dark-to-medium-brightness colors. This smearing reduces as you increase the brightness of the screen, but doesn't go away entirely until you get to like the top quarter of the screen's brightness. (If you have one of these phones, drop your screen brightness to the bottom quarter and browse through back issues of the Gunnerkrigg Court webcomic. There are PLENTY of black-on-X color combinations to get a really obvious demonstration of the problem.)
whywhywhywhy 1y ago
Something is poorly implemented with Windows UI on HDR, and Macbooks it all looks fine then HDR content just appears brighter, I think the rest of the UI becomes duller too at that point but on windows it feels like running HDR on the Windows desktop means the whole screen looks dull, least it does on my 5K HDR Dell. Not sure if I'm missing a setting, but I end up having to manually turn HDR on before playing a game and off after.

craxmerax 1y ago

When HDR is implemented properly, and you have a proper HDR display, it's such a transformative experience! Most games, however, don't have good HDR implementations. And for whatever reason HDR on Windows is still awful in 2025.

rag-hav 1y ago
Any examples of good HDR in games?
- simoncion 1y ago
  Here's my list from a couple of months ago, along with some related commentary: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43986463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43986463>
- WithinReason 1y ago
  I liked the talos principle 2 inside the pyramid after reducing the gamma a bit on a WOLED display

can16358p 1y ago

HDR is GREAT! Everyone trying to implement HDR + tone mapping excessively just for the sake of it and exaggerating it to show-off (just like those oversaturated Samsung phone screens) is not.

nottorp 1y ago
So were 3d movies until they stopped filming in 3d and started adding pointless effects in postprocessing :)
nwallin 1y ago
Yeah. There've been a laundry list of innovations over the years that people will invent, show how it improves how a scene looks, and then for the next few years everyone turns it up to 11 and it looks like shit. Bloom, SSAO, lens flare, film grain, vignetting, DoF. After a while people turn it back down to like a 4 and it improves things.
- rthrfrd 1y ago
  Yes, like everything: Nylon might be my favourite example of us never being able to use innovation in moderation.

refactor_master 1y ago

This is [...] a series examining techniques used in game graphics and how those techniques fail to deliver a visually appealing end result All I see is opinions though. And the internet is full of them. You just have to Google "why does this game look so ...". At least if the author had compared the search stats of "good/bad/beautiful/washed out" it would've carried some weight. The GTA 5 screenshot is a terrible example. It looks like a cheap, dead, video game environment, reminding me how far we've come.

phoronixrly 1y ago
I think the author's list of "ugly" games is missing Witcher III, Hellblade, God of War (2018), Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate... And we need some examples of good, cinematic, artful tone mapping, like any scene of a Hollywood movie set in Mexico...
- tmtvl 1y ago
  In my experience Elden Ring looks better when you turn the graphics quality down. Baldur's Gate isn't particularly ugly for a '98 game. And I agree that it would be nice to have some positive examples. I think there were a bunch of SNES games which did it well, but that may just be nostalgia.
  - Nicook 1y ago
    given the rest of the games listed I assume he means baldurs gate 3. Many younger people out themselves by just calling it baldurs gate.
  - lII1lIlI11ll 1y ago
    > Baldur's Gate isn't particularly ugly for a '98 game. I remember it looked beautiful. Especially comparing to early 3D games of that era.
- HelloUsername 1y ago
  > tone mapping, like any scene of a Hollywood movie set in Mexico That's not tone mapping, but color grading

0_____0 1y ago

Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622

pyrale 1y ago

> But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph. Or even a reasonably good offline render. Or a painting. They are instantly recognizable as video games, because only video games try to pass off these trashy contrast curves as aesthetically pleasing. Author is fumbling the difference between aesthetics and realism. Videogames feeling videogamey? What a travesty.

fabian2k 1y ago

For Horizon Zero Dawn I'd argue that the colors are clearly an artistic choice. They're not going for realistic colors at all. And the original game and its sequel do look very, very good. There do seem to be plenty of issues around HDR for sure, in some games I had to intentionally disable HDR on my PS5 because it just looked bad on my setup.

paulluuk 1y ago

I feel like this is very much a personal preference thing. They even called out Horizon Zero Dawn for looking very bad, and Zelda for looking very good.. while in my opinion the exact opposite is true.

abhpro 1y ago
The author is more pointing out that these games don't look realistic. Look at the foreground of the HZD shot - why is it almost black in daylight?
- phoronixrly 1y ago
  Zelda looks realistic to them?
  - whizzter 1y ago
    No, the author posits that Zelda explicitly goes for artistry and ignores any pretense of realism (that then falls flat on it's face when using an over-contrasting tone-map like in the HZD screenshot).
    - phoronixrly 1y ago
      Oh, I see. I disagree that the original HZD had a pretense of realism though. The remastered version does and well illustrates the uncanny-ness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlWK_ELBW08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlWK_ELBW08 . The outrageous god rays, bloom and lens flare in the remaster compensate for that because you can't actually see anything due to them blinding you...
    - jan_Inkepa 1y ago
      The problem I personally have with the Zelda example given is that it looks really bland to me - the landscape looks really washed out - the author says "Somebody would paint this. It’s artistic.", but I don't think anyone would paint with such bleached-out colours.

mg 1y ago

I really don't know what to think of HDR. I have yet to get any benefit out of it. I disable it everywhere I can. In Instagram for example. When it is turned on (the default) every now and then I get some crazy glaring image in my feed that hurts. Maybe it is because I don't play games? Is HDR useful anywhere outside of games?

simoncion 1y ago
> ...I get some crazy glaring image in my feed that hurts. Are you using an Apple machine to do your browsing? I have heard that Apple has (for some damn reason) decided to do this sort of crap with HDR-pictures-in-an-otherwise-SDR-document. It's nuts. This doesn't happen to me on Windows, and -because I use xorg- I've no idea what happens on Linux.

uncircle 1y ago

I found this video to visualise what tone mapping is trying to achieve, and why "photorealism" is hard to achieve in computer graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AT7H4GGrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AT7H4GGrA And I indirectly taught me how to use the exposure feature in my iPhone camera (when you tap a point in the picture). It's so that you choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process, using your eyes which have a much greater dynamic range than a CCD sensor. TIL.

akomtu 1y ago
I've heard a good point that our eyes have, in fact, a boring 1:100 range of brightness. Eyes can rapidly adjust, but the real game changer is our ability to create an image in our video memory, which has an unlimited brightness range. Eyes give us maybe a 2d uint8 framebuffer, but our mind creates and updates a float32 3d buffer. This is why this experience cannot be reproduced on a screen.
- hnuser123456 1y ago
  If our eyes can only see 100:1, why is OLED taking off? LCD has been claiming 1000:1 for decades
  - __alexs 1y ago
    In my case it's because the motion clarity of OLED is excellent.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    Because of fast & per-pixel level light control. Though this is true even if we completely ignore whether human eyes actually manifest a 100:1 auto-adapting dynamic range window.
amarshall 1y ago
> the exposure feature in my iPhone camera…choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process No, it uses that to set the physical exposure via the shutter speed and ISO (iPhones have a fixed aperture, so that cannot be changed). It literally says this in the video you linked. This is not tone mapping. Tone mapping in a way may also happen afterwards to convert from the wider dynamic range of the sensor if the output format has a more limited dynamic range.

jillesvangurp 1y ago

One game that actually puts a lot of effort into this is X-plane. They use physics based rendering and with recent updates they have done quite a bit of work on this (clouds, atmosphere, natural looking colors and shadows, HDR, etc. There's a stark contrast here with MS Flight Simulator which looks great but maybe a bit too pretty. It's certainly very pleasing to look at but not necessarily realistic. One thing with flying is that visibility isn't necessarily that good and a big part of using flight simulators professionally is actually learning to fly when the visibility is absolutely terrible. What's the relevance of scenery if visibility is at the legal minimums? You see the ground shortly before you land, a few feet in front of you. And even under better conditions, things are hazy and flat (both in color and depth). A crisp, high contrast, saturated view is pretty but not what a pilot deals with. A real problem for pilots is actually spotting where the airport is. Which is surprisingly hard even when the weather is nice and sunny. An interesting HDR challenge with cockpits is that the light level inside and outside are miles apart. When flying in the real world, your eyes compensate for this when you focus on the instruments or look outside. But technically any screenshot that features a bright outside and clearly legible instruments at the same time is not very realistic but also kind of necessary. You need to do some HDR trickery to make that work. Poor readability of instruments is something X-plane addressed in one of their recent updates. It was technically correct but not that readable. X-plane rendering has made some big improvements with all this during the v12 release over the last three years.

perching_aix 1y ago

Note that this post is of course about high internal dynamic range specifically and the necessary tonemapping that then follows for presenting an SDR image, not about how modern games do actual HDR (but then that should be pretty similar on a high level to the extent I understand anyways). > 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. And this is of course silly. In the real world you can have complete darkness, at which point dynamic range shoots up to infinity. > A typical screen can show 8 (curved to 600:1 or so). Not entirely sure about this either, monitors have been pulling 1000:1 and 2000:1 dynamic ranges since forever, even back in 2017 when this article was written, but maybe I just never looked too deep into it.

ethan_smith 1y ago
The static contrast ratio (1000:1+) you mention is different from effective perceived contrast after tone mapping - manufacturers' specs measure black-to-white in ideal conditions, while tone mapping algorithms must compress real-world luminance ranges (millions:1) into that limited display range while preserving perceptual detail.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  I'm not entirely sure how that's relevant to what I was saying.

viktorcode 1y ago

Please watch this for yet another take on the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j68UW21Nx6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j68UW21Nx6g The points are: game graphics is indeed suffering, but the problem is not being unlike films and photos, it's the opposite. The games should stop using film industry produced tone mapping curves and instead create their own, making a clean break. Personally, I agree with the video.

markus_zhang 1y ago

One big issue I never understood is why do we need photorealism in games at all. They seem to benefit card manufacturers and graphic programmers, but other than that I feel it has nothing to do — and in fact may have negative impact on game quality.

bre1010 1y ago
Completely agree. People lament the death of the RTS genre for all kinds of reasons but I think the biggest one was the early-2000s switch to 3D. Performance considerations meant you have way fewer units. The only exception was that Supreme Commander was somehow able to get around this, but suffered heavily from the second big problem with 3D RTSes: the tiny unit models are so much harder to tell apart in 3D compared to 2D. The RTS switch to 3D was a mistake and I think RTSes will continue to fail until their developers realize what actually makes them fun is actively hindered by this technology.
- nntwozz 1y ago
  I'm on the gameplay > graphics bandwagon too but StarCraft II and Age of Empires IV are proof that 3D is not the problem.
smt88 1y ago
I agree it doesn't benefit most games, but it's still genuinely amazing to see sometimes. I suspect part of the challenge with making a hit game with last-gen graphics (like Breath of the Wild) is that you need actual artists to make it look good.
eviks 1y ago
How do you understand other human desires? That is, what is different about the desire to match reality in other mediums is different from other more understandable desires?
senko 1y ago
This, in a nutshell, is why Nintendo is doing so well. Their hardware is underpowered, games look like cheap cartoons, but the effort spent into gameplay more than compensates.

altairprime 1y ago

It apparently took Mozilla a couple decades to allow displays to present #ff0000 as sRGB red correctly mapped into the display’s LUT, rather than as (100%, 0%, 0%) in the display’s native LUT, which is why for several years anyone using Firefox on a ProPhoto or Adobe RGB or, later, DCI-P3 or BT.2020 display would get eye-searing colors from the web that made you flinch and develop a migraine. It was, I assume, decided that the improper tone mapping curve gave their version of the web more lifelike color saturation than other browsers — at least on their majority platform Windows, which lacked simple and reasonable color management for non-professional users until Windows 11. So Firefox looked brighter, flashier on every shitty Windows display in the world, and since displays were barely capable of better than sRGB, that was good. Unfortunately, this also meant that Firefox gave eyestrain headaches to every design professional in the world, because our pro color displays had so much more eye-stabbing color and brightness capability than everyone else’s. It sucked, we looked up the hidden preference that could have been flipped to render color correctly at any time, and it was tolerable. Then Apple standardized DCI-P3 laptop displays on their phones and tablets, where WebKit did the right thing — and on laptops and desktops, where Firefox did not. Safari wasn’t very good yet back then to earn conversions, though certainly it is now, and when people tried to switch from Firefox the colors looked washed out and bland next to that native display punch. So everyone thought that Apple’s displays were too bright whenever they surfed the web and suffered through a bad LUT experience — literally, Firefox was jamming 100% phosphor brightness into monitors well in excess of sRGB’s specified luminosity range — by dimming their displays and complaining about Apple. And one day, Chrome showed up; faster, lighter, and most critically, not migraine inducing. The first two advantages drew people in; the third made them feel better physically. Designers, professionals, everyone who already had wide color monitors and then also students; would have eventually discovered (perhaps without ever realizing it!) that with Chrome (and with Safari, if they’d put up with it), they didn’t have to dim their monitors, because color wasn’t forcibly oversaturated on phosphors that could, at minimum, emit 50% higher nits than the old sRGB-era displays. The web didn’t cause eye strain and headaches anymore. Firefox must have lost an entire generation of students in a year flat — along with the everyone in web design, photography, and marketing that could possibly switch. Sure, Chrome was slightly better at the time; but once people got used to normal sRGB colors again, they couldn’t switch back to Firefox without everything being garish and bright, and so if they wished to leave Chrome they’d exit to Safari or Opera instead. I assume that the only reason Firefox finally fixed this was that CSS forcibly engraved into the color v3 specification a few years ago that, unless otherwise hinted, #ff0000 is in the sRGB color space and must be rendered as such. Which would have left them no room to argue; and so Firefox finally, far too late to regain its lost web designer proponents, switched the default. As the article describes, Nintendo understands this lesson fully, and chose to ship Zelda with artistic color that renders beautifully assuming any crap TV display, rather than going for the contrast- and saturation-maximizing overtones of the paired combination of brighter- and more-saturated- than sRGB that TV manufacturers call HDR. One need only look to a Best Buy TV wall to understand: every TV is blowing out the maximum saturation and brightness possible, all peacocks with their plumage flashing as brightly as possible, in the hopes of attracting another purchase. Nintendo’s behaviors suck in a lot of ways, but their artistic output understands perfectly how to be beautiful and compelling without resorting to the Firefox approach. (Incidentally, this is also why any site using #rrggbb looks last-century when embedded in, or shown next to, one designed using CSS color(..) clauses. It isn’t anything obvious, but once you know how to see it, it’s like the difference between 18-bit 256color ANSI and 24-bit truecolor ANSI. They’re not RGB hex codes; they’re sRGB hex codes.)

Jyaif 1y ago

After reading this article I feel like I learned nothing about what makes HDR good or bad.

serd 1y ago

From an interview with legendary Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi and Yukihito Morikawa of MuuMuu: "Do these playworlds really need to be that photorealistic, I wonder? I actually consider it more of a minus if the graphics are too realistic." https://shmuplations.com/yokoi/ https://shmuplations.com/yokoi/

freilanzer 1y ago

I cannot be the only who barely notices this in games.

deleted 1y ago
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sgarland 1y ago

This is apparently an unpopular opinion, but in many games (fantasy RPGs come to mind), I like the fake look. It helps it look other-worldly, IMO. I think for something like Flight Sim, I’d prefer photorealism, but otherwise I’m fine with it looking like, well, a video game. It might be a generational thing, too; I was born in the late 80s, and my formative years were spent playing cartoonish games like Commander Keen, Command & Conquer, etc.

sgarland 1y ago

> The exposure level is also noticeably lower, which actually leaves room for better mid-tone saturation. Decades ago, when I shot film, I remember discovering that I really liked how photos looked when underexposed by half a stop or so. I never knew why (and I wasn’t developing my own film, so I’ve no idea what the processor may have been doing), but I wonder if this was a contributing factor.

ChoGGi 1y ago

I don't want realistic looking games, I want pretty looking games. Look at movies that go all in on realism, can't see anything, can't hear anything. That's terrible.

happymellon 1y ago
The fact you can't hear anything has nothing to do with realism. It's lazyness. https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/ https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...

PaulHoule 1y ago

I was excited when I first heard about HDR but when I saw the implementation I thought: gee, they're going to screw up both the SDR and the HDR and that seems to be the case quite often. Going from SD -> HD your picture got better although it often got stretched out, but it's not so clear the HDR version of a movie is really going to be an improvement.

fidotron 1y ago

All of the "bad" examples look like they're playing on a PC with poorly set gamma curves. Play on a TV where the curves are setup properly because TV people actually care about color reproduction.

atoav 1y ago

As someone who worked a lot in realistic VFX I concur with the observation that nearly no game is doing tone mapping right and my guess to why that is always has been the fact that doing it right is just very complex. There are many, many things artists need to do correctly, many of which have no idea of the whole pipeline. Let's say someone creates a scene with a tree in it. What is the correct brightness, saturation and gamma of that trees texture? And if that isn't correct, how could the lighting artist correctly set the light? And if the texture and the light is wrong the correct tone lmap will look like shit. My experience is that you need to do everything right for a good tonemap to look realistically, and that means working like a scientist and having an idea of the underlying physical formulae and the way it has been implemented digitally. And that is sadly something not many productions appear to pull off. But if you pull it off everything pops into place. The added complication with games is of course that you can't just oprimize the light for one money shot, it needs to look good from all directions. And that means it is hard to make it look as good as a film shot, because that risks making it look like crap from other directions which studios aren't willing to risk. The dragon in The Hobbit isn't just about the tonemapping, it is at least as much (if not more so) a lighting issue. But the two can influence each other in a bad way.

os2warpman 1y ago

Why does everything (in big-budget video games) look shiny and wet? If it is an attempt at realism, reality is not constantly shiny and wet. If it a subjective artistic choice, it is objectively wrong and ugly. Is there an expectation that everything look shiny and wet to make it seem more "dynamic"? Is it an artists' meme, like the Wilhelm Scream in cinematic sound design?

mfro 1y ago
Overuse of reflective surfaces are the same kind of fad we saw with bloom in the mid 2000s and early 2010s. Now that SSR everywhere is technicaly feasible gamedevs want to use them everywhere. I think this started 5-10 years ago and RTX has renewed the meme, unfortunately.
schmidtleonard 1y ago
Specular highlights are cheap (frame time and artist time) and beautiful when done right, so everyone tries to do them and they get overcooked. There is a secondary problem in big budget games where modeling work gets farmed out leading to selection for "what looks good in the preview pic." In the preview pic, the asset artist gets to choose background/scene/lighting, and it's an easy trick to choose them to make the specular highlights pop. The person doing integration buys the asset, drops it in wildly different background/scene/lighting, and now the specular highlights are overcooked because the final scene wasn't chosen for the specific purpose of leveraging specular highlights. tl;dr artists ship the org chart too
perching_aix 1y ago
The common wisdom is that it's more difficult to make sunny and dry environments look pretty than it is overcast and wet ones. I tend to agree with this based on the end results I've seen over the many years.
- e3bc54b2 1y ago
  That's what I used to think too.. but Spec Ops: The Line is entirely based in desert, even has a shot of sarin horror and while 'pretty' isn't the word I'd use, it is stunning.

dahart 1y ago

I truly don’t understand the author’s opinions about contrast here. The RE7 image is the only one here that looks ‘realistic’, and at a glance could be mistaken for a photograph, and he says it’s got way too much contrast. No other image here comes anywhere even close, definitely not Zelda nor GTA5. Personally I think the whole problem with the first 5 images is that they don’t have enough contrast, and they have too much detail. The color handling isn’t the only reason they don’t look realistic, but making sure every single pixel’s nicely exposed and that nothing gets too dark or too bright is allowing to let all the CG fakeness show through. One of the reasons the RE7 image looks better is you can’t clearly see every single thing in the image. If you take photographs outside and the sun is in the shot, you will absolutely get some blown out white and some foreground blacks, and that’s realism. The CG here is trying too hard to squeeze all the color into the visible range. To my eyes, it’s too flat and too low contrast, not too high contrast.

kevingadd 1y ago
One problem with photorealism is a lot of players are on bad displays, or in bad viewing environments. Games often take this into account in their visual direction so that they will be more legible in these different environments. It used to be even worse when designing a game for say the Gameboy Advance or original Nintendo DS where you knew the screen wasn't backlit or wasn't particularly bright so your images needed to be bright and colorful. Even now, a Nintendo Switch game might be played on the bus. For big budget games the solution for this is typically to have brightness calibration when the game first boots up, but the game itself still needs to be designed adaptively so that it's not Too Dark or Too Bright at critical points, otherwise the playability of the title is jeopardized. This runs counter to a goal of photorealism.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I made thermal prints (receipt printer) of concept art from Pokémon Sun and Moon for the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, like this one https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 and found they did really well because the art was designed to look good on bad screens and poor viewing conditions. I think of it in terms of Ansel Adam's Zone theory in that the ideal image is (1) legible if you quantize it to 11 tones of grey (looks OK printed in the newspaper), but (2) has meaningful detail in most or all of those zones. I'm kinda disappointed that the Nintendo 3DS version didn't use the stereo effects but they would have had to decided if her hair forms a sheet or a cone.

the__alchemist 1y ago

Hmm. I like the author's main point in many video games doing this unrealistically, but there are a few sticking points that are relevant from the past few years: - The omission of discussing HDR monitors, and how you can't really capture that on a screenshot. This is a game changer, especially with new games and monitors. - The omissions of discussing Unreal5 games that have come out in the past few years. (e.g. Talos principle 2, Hellblade 2, Stalker 2) - Not enough examples of games that do it well, with A/B comparisons of similar settings - The Nintendo screenshot as an example of doing things right isn't working for me. Another interesting example of lighting done well is Kingdome Come Deliverance 2. The details don't look nearly as nice as, e.g. UE5 game and it unfortunately doesn't support monitor HDR, but it has very realistic looking lighting and scenes.

cubefox 1y ago
The article is from 2017.
- the__alchemist 1y ago
  Oh wow. I wonder what the author thinks of the new trends! I bet he or she would be pleasantly surprised by some of them.
  - cubefox 1y ago
    Yeah, since then there were some games with very natural looking contrast and colors, perhaps most notably Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Or, years later, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (2025), which you already mentioned. As a negative example: as far as I can tell, Horizon Forbidden West (2022) mostly doubled down on the exaggerated color contrast he criticized in the predecessor.
    - the__alchemist 1y ago
      Concur on Forbidden West having the same problem as HZD that the author mentioned. I remember thinking about the dark/indoor areas with accent lighting, and vegetation in particular compared to similar scenes in Talos Principle 2. (Similar release dates) HZD wasn't in the same league as Talos.

esafak 1y ago

The screenshot of "Zelda: Breath of the Wild " the author holds up as an exemplar looks unrealistically tone mapped to me. The "bad" screenshots in the lede look more natural and pleasing. Not realistic -- they're too stylized for my taste -- but the Zelda screenshot is simply unrealistic in a different direction.

the__alchemist 1y ago
This is an example of a phenomenon I've seen many times on the internet: - Person has a critique of certain media (books, authors, games etc). They are valid critiques. - You ask what the person thinks is an example of media that doesn't have this problem, or the media they like. - The examples given are not in the same league, or do the one thing better, and many other aspects poorly.

turnsout 1y ago

This article is just misinformed. Source: I’ve been working with color space conversion, HDR tone mapping, gamut mapping and “film look” for 20 years. It’s clear from their critique of the first screenshots that their problem is not with HDR, but contrast levels. Contrast is a color grading decision totally separate from HDR tonemapping. There’s then a digression about RED and Arri that is incorrect. Even their earliest cameras shot RAW and could be color matched against each other. Then they assert that tone mapping is hampered by being a 1D curve, but this is more or less exactly how film works. AAA games often come up with their own curves rather than using stock curves like Hable or ACES, and I would assume that they’re often combined with 3D LUTs for “look” in order to reduce lookups. The author is right about digital still cameras doing a very good job mapping the HDR sensor data to SDR images like JPEGs. The big camera companies have to balance “accuracy” and making the image “pleasing,” and that’s what photographers commonly call their “color science.” Really good gamut mapping is part of that secret sauce. However, part of what looks pleasing is that these are high contrast transforms, which is exactly what the author seems to not like. They say “we don’t have the technical capability to run real film industry LUTs in the correct color spaces,” which is just factually incorrect. Color grading software and AAA games use the same GPUs and shader languages. A full ACES workflow would be overkill (not too heavy, just unnecessarily flexible) for a game, because you can do you full-on cinema color grading on your game and then bake it into a 3D LUT that very accurately captures the look. The author then shows a screenshot of Breath of the Wild, which I’m nearly positive uses a global tonemap—it just might not do a lot of dynamic exposure adjustment. Then they evaluate a few more images before praising a Forza image for being low contrast, which again, has nothing to do with HDR and everything to do with color grading. Ultimately, the author is right that this is about aesthetics. Unfortunately, there’s no accounting for taste. But a game’s “look” is far more involved than just the use of HDR or tone mapping.

jpadkins 1y ago

Path of Exiles 2 is a good recent example of a game that does a pretty good job of contrast and tone (staying true to the dark, gritty theme that is going for). I think it was smart of the devs to keep all the high contrast to effects and lighting.

SirMaster 1y ago

This seems pretty irrelevant now. This article is from 2017 which is before we had proper real HDR support in Windows 10 and much better HDR support now in Windows 11. And before we had OLED gaming monitors which can actually now display good HDR at 1000+ nits. This was definitely during a transitional phase with mostly fake HDR techniques that needed tone-mapping. Now we have real HDR that doesn't need tone-mapping, or only a small amount of tone-mapping above the display peak nits point.

theshackleford 1y ago
> And before we had OLED gaming monitors which can actually now display good HDR at 1000+ nits. It’s worth pointing out these monitors for the most part can not sustain it or achieve it at anything other than the smallest possible window sizes, such as the 1-3% window sizes at best. > Now we have real HDR that doesn't need tone-mapping, or only a small amount of tone-mapping above the display peak nits point. For the reasons outlined above (and other) tone mapping is still heavily required. It’s worth noting that OLED TVs do a significantly better job at displaying high nits in both percentage of the display and in sustaining it. It’s my hope the monitors eventually catch up because I waited a long time for it to become monitor sized.
- SirMaster 1y ago
  > It’s worth pointing out these monitors for the most part can not sustain it or achieve it at anything other than the smallest possible window sizes, such as the 1-3% window sizes at best. Sure, but the parts of the image that are anywhere near 1000 nits are usually quite small and are things like muzzle flashes or light fixtures or centers of explosions, or magic effects etc. https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/rog-swift-oled-pg27aqdm https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/rog-swift-oled-p... This is OLED gaming monitor that came out 2 years ago measures 904 nits on a 10% sustained white window.
  - theshackleford 1y ago
    > Sure, but the parts of the image that are anywhere near 1000 nits are usually quite small and are things like muzzle flashes or light fixtures or centers of explosions, or magic effects etc. Sure, but plenty of things are bright enough in combination at varying window sizes that combined the panels have to drop down significantly. So you might get 1000 nits for a muzzle flash but ~200nits at best for a “bright sunny day.” The problem is way too many people (I’m not suggesting you) don’t realise this and just think they are “getting 1000nits!” >https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/rog-swift-oled-pg27aqdm https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/rog-swift-oled-p... Yes, I own this display and it’s one of the better ones for brightness which is why I grabbed it. However even on the latest firmware, It has a bunch of issues including with colours in HDR unfortunately. It also has incredibly aggressive ABL. Still a great display, but with more limitations compared to the TVs than I’d like still. They’ll get there though hopefully in few more generations.

pflenker 1y ago

I skipped the text and looked at the images and was unable to understand if they were supposed to be bad or good examples. I liked them. Then k read through the text and learned that they are supposed to be bad examples. But why though? I suspect that either I am not good at this kind of thing, or this is a purist thing, like „don’t put pineapples on pizza because they don’t do that in Italy“. I don’t want games to look realistic. A rainy day outside looks gray and drab, there is nothing wrong with rainy days in games not looking like the real thing, but awesome and full of contrasts.

CupricTea 1y ago
>I don’t want games to look realistic. A rainy day outside looks gray and drab, there is nothing wrong with rainy days in games not looking like the real thing, but awesome and full of contrasts. In photography and cinematography contrast and color curves are near ubiquitously modified artistically to evoke a certain feeling. So even without 3D renderings added colors are adjusted for aesthetic over raw realism.
diob 1y ago
Reminds me of how movies / shows these days have gotten so dark, when in the past even dark scenes were often lit in such a way as to show details.
chihuahua 1y ago
I totally agree. The example pictures in the article look fine. I don't know what the author wants, but perhaps it's some kind of industry insider view similar to where "true artists' make movies that are so dark you can't see anything, and the dialog is quiet mumbling and the sound effects are ear-shattering. Perhaps there's an equivalent to that in games.
- kllrnohj 1y ago
  > I don't know what the author wants If only they had written an article about what they wanted... > but perhaps it's some kind of industry insider view similar to where "true artists' make movies that are so dark you can't see anything Nope, it's not that.

otikik 1y ago

The article lacks some examples of what "done right" means. It points to some videogames that "do it terribly" (they look ok to me? not photorealistic, but not every videogame has to be like that?) but it does not show how "a correct" version of each image would be. Just says "it looks obviously bad". Sorry but I don't see it. I'm fine with videogames looking videogamey.

armonster 1y ago
The article shows 5 images from games showing it done poorly, and 4 images from games showing it done well. A fifth image of it done well was added in an edit.
- otikik 1y ago
  It doesn’t matter if the images are different. To the author it might be super obvious why some are good and others aren’t. To me they all look good.

int0x29 1y ago

I suspect contrast in a lot of the games he's skewering is high because they are shootery type games where players need too see things, understand them, and react to them quickly Also I don't necessarily see a need to make everything look like physical film.

gloosx 1y ago

All these massive studios with their grand budgets can't make a game which is not looking like a cartoon. A real masterpiece of modern graphics is a game made by two brothers called "Bodycam"

codeulike 1y ago

Previously posted in 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622

deleted 1y ago

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qoez 1y ago

Am I taking crazy pills or are the blacks actually crushed in zelda but not crushed in zero dawn (opposite to what's stated).

lawlessone 1y ago

slightly related but a lot of newer games have weird colour filtering and post processing effects now that drive me nuts

ooterness 1y ago

The opposite extreme: physics-based rendering that models the entire optical chain of a film camera, including the emulsion layers. https://youtu.be/YE9rEQAGpLw?feature=shared https://youtu.be/YE9rEQAGpLw?feature=shared

meinersbur 1y ago

Researchers trained a deep learning network on photos to make GTA5 more realistic-looking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 I was surprised that most of it is is just tone mapping. It looks too green-ish to me, needing some white balancing, but realistic. I think Video games are intentionally over-saturated and contrasty to make them look better, just as paintings are[1]. I took many screenshots in Horizon Zero Dawn that would be look bland if it was realistic like the modfified GTA5 footage above[2]. You also don't want animation movies[3] with realistic tone mapping. But for a horror game you would do exactly that, it's about immersion (or you would never be frightened), not beauty. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/1ix7ms2/my_hzd_oilpainting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/1ix7ms2/my_hzd_oil... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/x97gi1/this_game_is_a_visual_masterpiece/ https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/x97gi1/this_game_i... [3] https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0892769/mediaviewer/rm2841021440/?ref_=tt_ov_m_sm https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0892769/mediaviewer/rm284102...

saltcured 1y ago
That's pretty funny... at least the narrator seems to reference the problem. It is trying to normalize it to some model of reality extracted from photos of Germany. I think the stock game footage may be too contrasty but has much more realistic coloring for how Southern California actually looks in the summer. Chalk one up for needing reality filters to include a notion of locale-specific and season-specific references?