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If you have a DirectX 9 capable video card, here's a nice demo of some HDR lighting on simple objects.

A fairly impressive app that demonstrates HDR, motion blur, depth of field, etc. can be found here.

http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/

My lowly graphics card can barely handle this app (Geforce 4200), but I can't wait until games support all of these features.

If you're impatient and want to know what the fuss about high dynamic range is all about, try this demo. It's quite pretty looking, far superior to the overused bloom effect in my opinion.

direct link

It's a shame that Valve haven't tried to add image-based lighting like that in to Lost Coast!

The technique is certainly possible to do in realtime. Perhaps we'll see something like garry's mod incorporating it soon?

Is this really any different than flashbang grenades we've seen in CS?

Yes. Very different.

I've posted links to it before, but here's a great demonstration of high-dynamic-range lighting, albeit taken to GPU-bullying extremes.

Basically, lighting in current games has very little range. A seemingly 'dark' room may actually be only slightly dimmer than the bright summer day 'outside'; in the case of lightmaps, it goes from 0 (pitch black) to 255 (as bright as possible). If you've had any experience with photography, you'll know that real life has a much greater range - for example, this was several thousand times brighter than this.

HDR can give back that variation, with lightmaps (or whatever) done with floating point, for a lighting range of 'well, lots'. Various post-processing effects are possible, such as 'bloom' and true motion-blur (specular highlights don't get turned into grey for each sub-frame) - basically, it's a much more realistic model of how light works.

Because output to the monitor is still 0-255 per channel, it gives the player an 'eye' which automatically adjusts to the ambient brightness. So, if you immediately step from a bright, sunny day into a dark monastery (for example), your eyes will need time to adjust.

Hmm. Someone needs to do a Thief-style game with HDR... ;-)

At this rate soon we will have processors that are capable of rendering real video instead of animation. Or say animation as real as videio footage.

Hardly. Most game-style rendering today is mostly smoke and mirrors; while 3D graphics hardware has improved at a ridiculous rate over the last couple of years, there's still a long way to go before certain, everyday scenes can be rendered.

Something I'd like would be a 'city-renderer', capable of rendering a decent-sized European city (i.e. not a grid) from aerial views down to individual rooms. While a clever level-of-detail system could go a long way towards this, there would still be an utterly horrendous amount of geometry for a typical skyline shot.

Now add traffic, crowds of humans (typical FPS-style games give up after about ten or so, strategy games use crude mannequins for more), properly reflective surfaces and whatnot, motion blur and decent HDR and your quadruple-SLI Geforce 9000-Hyper-Pro-Matic setup will still grind to a halt.

Things are slowly getting there, but I'm still waiting - but like a gas, FPS-style generic corridors will expand in processing requirements until they saturate even the greatest hardware. Look at Doom 3, for example... ;-)

Is this the HDR demo you mentioned?