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High Dynamic Range (HDR) Technology Analysis
THG writes "CoolTechZone.com has published an analysis of Valve's High Dynamic Range, or HDR, technology that enhances graphics in video games. This new video/gaming graphics technology is expected to debut soon with Valve's Half-Life 2: Lost Coast title. According to the article, 'HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a lighting process that's been designed to emulate in-game or artificially generated lighting to closely mirror the changes we see in the real world. In simpler terms, HDR allows you to make the objects brighter by allowing them to use the full brightness capabilities of the monitor and not just the brightness level at which they have been shot with (or rendered with) in the scene.'"
The truth is, our computer monitors are very limited in the range of colors they can reproduce. We have been stuck with 8 bit RGB for a long time now, I'm surprised we haven't moved on to 16 bit per color or even floating point by now. Internally, video cards in the future will render using floating point arithmatic, but I'm guessing they will still be transmitted as 8 bit per color RGB. Not only that, most image file formats like JPEG are only 24 bit.
Furthermore, we really need to increase contrast ratios of monitors. Having a single back-lit isn't really good enough. I would imagine something containing say a few thousand high intensity white LED's in an array would be good. This way, you could only light up sections of the monitor that need high dynamic range. With enough LED's (a few thousand, not one for each pixel) you could produce quite an interesting effect. I believe there is a monitor that some company is working on that does this.
Of course, I probably should'nt be complaining at all. I'm very happy with my 24" HD monitor I just installed today...
Since this is a technology included in software, why is it listed as hardware?
You've missed the point - though I can't blame you, judging by the blurb the article was less than pedagogical when trying to explain HDR.
This isn't about altering what any "author" intended. On the contrary, HDR is a new tool which lets the "author" do what's intended more easily, assuming what's intended is to achieve realistic lighting in the rendered scenes. Try Anandtech's recent article on the topic, they explain it very well.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
It's a lot more than just a bass boost, since it's not just a brightness increase, but an increase in the range of brightness, allowing for very high contrast. If you go back and look at a Source game without HDR after seeing HDR for awhile, it looks like it has a dark film over it, similar to a digital camera picture looks before being run through auto-contrast in Photoshop.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
I think, if you want to be precise, what Valve did in Lost Coast should be called Paul Debevec's High Dynamic Range.
except that the authors are the ones using and implementing hdr. If it was a mod to a game already released I would agree, but the case for most games is going to be to add this as a feature. So I guess to include your example, maybe if Trent Reznor released some track that had mega bass activated through effects that would make sense, but really, im not sure that its the greatest analogy. ;/
Think of it this way:
When you wake up at night and you can see the room in nearly pitch black, things appear to be as bright as your room in the morning with the shades closed. Actually, the room in the morning is 1000 times brighter. The "author" of the real world (God?) "intended" the room to be 1000 times brighter by slamming 1000 times more protons onto your retina, but your brain normalizes things to make the world easier to comprehend.
Now, when you are playing a video game, and you go into a dark room with almost no light, current algorithms don't make it easier to see anything - they present you with a black screen. When you walk out into the sunlight, you get a white screen. This is now the way our brain sees the world, and makes the experience less realistic.
Audio, on the other hand, can be presented to us nearly perfectly. My headphones can range from 20 Hz to 20 KHz, all the frequencies our ears can hear. The mega-bass thing is therefore useless if you have a decent pair of speakers.
I guess my point can be summed up with this example: you can make a really good set of speakers as loud as an airplane if you want. Your monitor, however, cannot shine the sun in your eyes.
Looks like they apply auto-levels to each frame. That shouldn't affect performance a lot, btw. It is really a work-around for bad rendering. They could fix low dynamic range earlier in the output pipeline.
The major part of HDR (excluding glare and all that), is that it is a way to model the way that the iris (the black bit in the middle of your eye) opens and closes at different brightness levels.
There is something missing though, which I think would be beneficial. Basically, the eye has rods and cones for luminance and colour respectively. The rods are far more sensitive than the cones, with the result being that in very low light conditions, we see in greyscale. I have never seen this effect in a game (or film), and I think it would really enhance the realism, especially in darker games like Doom3. It would be even better if the display could become slightly blurry and noisy as the rods are not as high resolution as the cones.
Finally! I've been waiting for the day developers would decide my graphics card with its high-res 32-bit textures displayed on 1600 by 1200 with maximum draw distance, 3 kinds of filtering, and 8 layers of model mesh effects would look better washed out anytime the sun is up.
I can see it now- Unreal Tournament 2007: Pre-Order and get a FREE pair of Eagle-Eye sunglasses using patented NASA anti-glare technology!
Just give me the damn Kryptonite fog already. Serves us right for letting game designers use that much texture memory for crap like sand anyway. What did we think we were supporting?
Anyone wanna play Duke Nukem 3D? Now THAT game had some good graphics.
Or some MultiTheftAuto VC before the HDR-compatible windshield glare updates?
That is the worst explenation of HDR I have ever seen. Clearly missed the point.
sudo ergo sum
Paul Debevec, through his papers on acquiring low dynamic range imagery and turning that into high dynamic range imagery - and a utility to go with it coded with help from others; HDRshop, has made HDR accessible and popular.
However, 'HDR' as the storage format being used most frequently already existed in the rendering application Radiance for a long, long time before that.
In fact, -most- rendering applications render in HDR - but are forced to clip values so that you can actually output it to a regular display (e.g. your TFT) or storage format (e.g. JPG).
In fact, Valve's HDR isn't an HDR display technology. It's a partial HDR pipeline for rendering (making sure that glints of the sun are bright on water surfaces, and not dull), processing (bloom effects) and simple tone mapping a la a LUT (look into a room from a skylit outside, and the room may appear dark. Walk inside, and the room appears normal whilst the outside world will appear very bright indeed. Note that a more proper tone mapping algorithm would, besides being computationally very expensive, show the room normally and the outside world bright - but not so bright as to be blown out.)
Once we've all got HDR displays (search on Slashdot for these - I've seen them, they're awesome), we can do away with all these basic gimmicks as the human visual perceptance system will simply do all the interpreting of what should be 'correct' HDR values coming from the display.
I think that technologies like this being refined are really where the future of gaming graphics is going to be for a while. While there is still a ways to go in terms of polygon count, texture and bump mapping, etc, a lot of progress has been made in these areas. I think what we will see (or hope to see anyway) offered in newer games is more support for technologies that simulate real time lighting, shadows, translucance, refraction, etc. A large part of this I think is that there are only so many resources that can be dedicated to artists now to create higher polygon count models and higher resolution more diverse textures, so things that can be done to increase the visuals of a game without having to dedicate significantly more resources to artists can vastly improve the visual quality of a game without such a significant increase in cost associated with actually crafting those visuals. With technologies such as this allowing a more realistic rendering of ourdoor scenes combined with improving algorithms for creating outdoor environments and the ability to create fractal plantlife I think that we will see a new generation of games that take the player more and more often into the less confined feeling outdoor world.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Funny how the schools where they preach abstinence have much higher rates of teen pregnancy...
n ews_1n2preg.html
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050902/
I consider myself to have both liberal and conservative elements in my political beliefs, but I rather suspect that the 'will is weak' answer is rather unkind.
Shit happens. The flesh is weak.
Rather than blame individuals for not being able to solve their problems using a difficult solution, wouldn't it be more cost-effective to give them an easier way to fix their problems?
It's kind of like blaming you for trying to break down a solid oak door with your bare hands, when the key is hanging on the wall right next to you. I mean, yeah, you *could* keep bashing away at it, or you could use the easy solution.
I don't particularly care how they get their condoms, but they should at least be presented the option. Instead, some schools focus solely on abstinence, ignoring the fact that condoms are, in fact, a viable option. Pretending that sex isn't going to happen is extremely optimistic, and, well, paying for condoms is way cheaper than paying for a kid.