[HN Gopher] Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)
Author : uncircle
Score : 177 points
Date : 2025-07-25 07:26 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ventspace.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ventspace.wordpress.com)
| gampleman wrote:
| [2017]
| dartharva wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 difference
| things.
| simoncion wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Any examples of good HDR in games?
| simoncion wrote:
| Here's my list from a couple of months ago, along with some
| related commentary:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43986463>
| WithinReason wrote:
| I liked the talos principle 2 inside the pyramid after
| reducing the gamma a bit on a WOLED display
| can16358p wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So were 3d movies until they stopped filming in 3d and started
| adding pointless effects in postprocessing :)
| nwallin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes, like everything: Nylon might be my favourite example of
| us never being able to use innovation in moderation.
| refactor_master wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > tone mapping, like any scene of a Hollywood movie set in
| Mexico
|
| That's not tone mapping, but color grading
| ranguna wrote:
| I'm not sure you were being ironic, I find the witcher 3 and
| elden ring beautiful
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think Elden Ring is a little ugly but still a world I
| want to experience.
| Timon3 wrote:
| While the graphics aren't as good as some other modern
| titles, the world and art design make up for it ten times
| over. There are a bunch of locations that could be
| paintings, especially:
|
| - The first steps in Limveld
|
| - Liurnia of the Lakes (from Stormveil)
|
| - Leyndell
|
| - The first look at the Scadutree
|
| - Cerulean Coast
|
| - Stone Coffin Fissure
|
| - Enir Ilim
|
| I can't remember another property with a similar
| diversity of incredibly beautiful and imposing areas.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622
| pyrale wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Zelda looks realistic to them?
| whizzter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 . 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jcelerier wrote:
| yeah, no one would ever do that https://artlogic-
| res.cloudinary.com/w_2000,h_1600,c_limit,f_...
| dahauns wrote:
| To be fair - if I remember the location correctly - that
| screenshot is somewhat misleading because it's camera
| position is from the inside of a large ruin, with the ceiling
| and right wall of the "cave entrance" being just outside the
| frame.
| uncircle wrote:
| I do see the point of the author: HZD goes for a "realistic",
| high-fidelity 3D fantasy world, yet the lighting makes no sense
| in physical terms. The contrast and brightness shown in the
| picture are all over the place, and can only be an artifact of
| visualising a world through a computer screen which has a very
| limited dynamic range - it is immersion-breaking. The Resident
| Evil 7 picture below looks much better. The video I linked in
| another comment explains why: in the physical world, the
| stronger the light, the more washed-out the colour will become.
| HZD is a saturated, high-contrast mess with too much
| compression in the low light, because of a bad colour mapper in
| their pipeline.
|
| One can claim HZD's look is an "artistic choice" and that's
| inarguable, but the author believes it's simply not enough
| attention to the tone mapping process, which is a very
| complicated topic that's not usually taken seriously in game
| dev compared to film production.
| mfro wrote:
| I think with enough exposure to the overdone contrast ratios,
| you start to get tired of it. It sacrifices a lot of clarity. I
| agree it does look good in some cases, for example I enjoy the
| look of Battlefield 1 a lot, but when playing it I often
| noticed I had issues seeing detail in darker areas.
| mg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > ...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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If our eyes can only see 100:1, why is OLED taking off? LCD
| has been claiming 1000:1 for decades
| __alexs wrote:
| In my case it's because the motion clarity of OLED is
| excellent.
| perching_aix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure how that's relevant to what I was
| saying.
| viktorcode wrote:
| Please watch this for yet another take on the issue:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| I don't agree here.
|
| Nintendo games don't look like cheap cartoons at all. They
| are absolutely not photorealistic but they do put a lot of
| work on the aesthetics/art and it's most of the time relly
| impressive once you take the hardware limitations into
| account.
|
| Mario 64 ran on the same console that was known for its 3D
| blur.
|
| Mario Galaxy 1&2 (which are still totally modern in terms of
| aesthetics) ran on what was basically an overclocked
| gamecube.
|
| Mario Kart 8 which is still more beautiful than a lot of
| modern games ran on the Switch, which is itself based on a
| 2015 mid-range smartphone hardware.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| I think it's more that Nintendo's choice of hardware (and
| its relative lack of horsepower) force them into more
| stylized visuals because it means photo-realism is
| basically off the table to start with. We the audience tend
| not to care, because Nintendo has capable artists who can
| create something aesthetically pleasing outside of
| "realistic" graphics.
| dartharva wrote:
| There are tens (if not hundreds) of indie and B-games that
| offer the same experience as most current Nintendo titles.
| Nintendo is doing well more because of nostalgia - it's the
| parents buying those consoles for their kids because they
| have very fond memories with Nintendo from their own
| childhoods.
| theshackleford wrote:
| I would disagree. And I know many adults in the PC gaming
| space like myself who would disagree.
|
| I like my indie games, but not many are putting out what
| Nintendo is.
|
| I mean it's all subjective though.
| senko wrote:
| I don't suffer from that particular nostalgia, not having
| had a Nintendo console (C64/Amiga diehard here), but I
| bought Wii and Switch, and a couple of first-party games
| for each.
|
| I considered, and passed on, the other consoles.
|
| Nintendo is playing a different game than other
| console/game makers (excuse the pun), IMHO.
| rendaw wrote:
| I think, like polygon count, resolution, FPS, etc, realism is
| very easy to objectively assess and compare even with no
| artistic background, which makes it a target both for gamers
| (who want to explain why they like a game, or debate which game
| is better) and studios who want something they can point to.
|
| IMO it leads to really stilted experiences, like where now you
| have some photo realistic person with their foot hovering
| slightly in space, or all that but you still see leaves
| clipping through eachother, or the unanny valley of a super
| realistic human whose eyes have a robotic lock on your face,
| etc.
|
| Physical interaction with game worlds (wasd and a single pivot,
| or maybe a joystick and a couple buttons) hasn't increased in
| depth in 20 years which only emphasizes the disjointedness.
| ehnto wrote:
| I totally agree with your last paragraph except to add: there
| has actually been some great advances in interaction, but
| people vote with their playtime, and I think the reality is
| that the "median gamer" is totally content with WASD +
| mouse/the typical controller thumbstick movement. In the same
| way that so many are content that many game mechanics boil
| down to combat and health bars.
|
| I am personally not content with that and I explore all I
| can, and am trying to make games that skirt the trends a
| little bit.
|
| But that stark contrast between visual fidelity but a lack of
| interactivity has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. You
| can even do so much more with just mouse and keyboard
| interactions, but I think it's overshadowed by the much lower
| risk visual fidelity goals.
| glimshe wrote:
| We don't _need_ photorealism in games, but it does help with
| immersion. Many people, like me, feel like they are inside the
| game world, rather than playing a game with a TV /monitor in
| front of them. Photorealism is essential for this feeling - at
| least for me .
|
| The most amazing gaming experience I've ever had was walking
| around the city at night in Cyberpunk 2077. For the first time
| in my life, I felt I was actually in the future. Zelda can't
| pull that off with me, despite being a great game from other
| perspectives.
| ehnto wrote:
| You're not alone, Cyberpunk's blend of near-future with
| realism whilst maintaining a clear art style that is not
| total realism is very immersive. I have spent countless hours
| wandering around Night City, not even playing the main
| gameplay.
| XorNot wrote:
| CP2077 was the game I drove most carefully in when not on a
| mission, just coz it felt right that V wouldn't be hooning
| around his home turf. The immersion was incredible.
| Nicook wrote:
| Out of curiosity do you not get immersed in books?
| dostick wrote:
| You can get immersed in anything. With games or VR realism,
| it's like extra depth of immersion when your brain switch
| to think in same way as you think in real world rather than
| adapting to physics or terrain of fake world.
| glimshe wrote:
| I do, but not like cyberpunk. I like to both read and watch
| movies, but I feel a lot more immersed with images than I
| do with words. It's not a binary rating (immersed vs not
| immersed), it's a gradient that makes things resonate more
| strongly with photorealism.
|
| This is one reason, I believe, why some people can't stand
| animated cartoons. I like them but I know many people who
| won't even consider watching animation.
| treyd wrote:
| I find this an interesting argument. I wonder if it's a
| generational thing.
|
| If we define immersion as "your vision focuses on what's
| inside the screen and you ignore the world around the screen,
| and you mostly ignore that your control of the player
| character is through a keyboard and mouse", then I've
| experienced immersion with every first person game ever,
| including _Minecraft_. I never considered that some people
| might need photorealism for that at all. There was another
| commenter that mentioned being unable to walk over a short
| wall due to character controller limitations as being
| immersion-breaking. I agree this is annoying but the qualia
| of it is more like a physical confusion rather than being
| something that actually breaks my experience of the game.
|
| I'm also thinking this might be related to why I find VR to
| be, while very cool, not some revolutionary new technology
| that will fundamentally change the world.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > VR to be, while very cool, not some revolutionary new
| technology
|
| VR despite its limitations is the one thing I've ever
| achieved "presence" in, as in feeling if for a brief
| moment, I was actually there.
|
| Elite dangerous, OLED Unit, HOTAS. For a brief moment in
| time my brain _believed_ it was in the cockpit of a
| spaceship.
| andybak wrote:
| I had a similar experience in a a game meant to simulate
| regular city car driving.
|
| Most releveant to this comment thread however was the
| fact that the graphics were _very_ crude and not in a
| good way. I absolutely dispute the claim that realism
| equals (immersion /presence - I'm not getting involved in
| the debate about the distinction between the two)
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'd argue that immersion has little to do with graphics, even
| for FPS. Actually I had more immersion in some text adventure
| games than in some AAA games -- and not out of nostalgia
| because I never played the said text adventure games before.
|
| I'd agree that certain degree of graphics helps with
| immersion, but photorealistic graphics only offers cheap
| immersion which turns off the immersion centre in the brain
| -- Ok this is just my babble so 100% guess.
| TurkTurkleton wrote:
| Agreed. Immersion in a game world, at least for me, is less
| about how accurately it visually reflects reality and more
| about how detailed the overall world _feels_ -- whether the
| designers have crafted worlds that feel like they live and
| breathe without you, that you could imagine inhabiting as
| someone other than the protagonist. For instance, I can
| imagine what it would be like to live in _Cyberpunk 2077_
| 's Night City, whether I was a merc like V or just one of
| the nobodies trying to get by that you pass on the street;
| I can imagine living in _Dishonored_ 's Dunwall (or the
| sequel's Karnaca) in the chaos and uncertainty of their
| plagues; I can put myself in the shoes of one of the
| faceless, downtrodden members of the proletariat of
| Coalition-occupied Revachol in _Disco Elysium_ ; a lot of
| AAA games, on the other hand, feel like theme park rides--
| well-crafted experiences that are enjoyable but don't stick
| with you and discourage you from thinking too deeply about
| them because they don't withstand much scrutiny. But
| _Cyberpunk 2077_ is evidence that they don 't _have_ to be
| that way, and _Dishonored_ and _Disco Elysium_ are equally
| evidence that you don 't need a half-billion-dollar budget
| and photorealistic graphics to create immersive worlds.
|
| (edited to clarify that I'm not laboring under the
| misapprehension that _Cyberpunk 2077_ isn 't a AAA game)
| dahart wrote:
| I recall a paper from GDC many years back that studied the
| perception of immersion and they measured and ranked maybe
| a dozen different factors. Graphics and visuals were
| surprisingly low on the list. The number one thing was the
| player's sense of identity and clear understanding of their
| goals. Players tended to correlate realism with high
| immersion too.
| teamonkey wrote:
| Oh that sounds really interesting, I'd like to track it
| down.
|
| Was it this one?
| https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015464/Attention-Not-
| Immersio...
| dahart wrote:
| That's definitely in the same realm, but not the one I
| was thinking of. I believe I'm thinking of something
| maybe 10 years earlier, it had multiple authors, at least
| one woman, and some of the authors were psychology
| researchers who were into games. I'd wouldn't be
| surprised if this is a theme and avenue of research that
| has come up many years at GDC.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| There's something about the image quality of Cyberpunk that
| looks off to me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe
| the hair rendering? Shadowing?
|
| It's clearly going for photo realism, but it somehow looks
| worse to me than older, lower-fidelity games.
| genewitch wrote:
| DLSS really messes with the realism, however for actual
| gameplay it's less annoying to me than i thought it would
| be from such games as diablo IV and others in that cohort.
| If you want maximum quality, don't let an AI draw what the
| developers (artists) intended, just draw what the
| developers intended. i replied to a sibling comment with 4
| photo mode screenshots, and you can see that there's a lot
| of variation in environment lighting, and all of the
| ambient light is pre-arranged by the design team and
| developers. In CP2077 a lot of quests are "go to <location>
| at dusk/dawn/night/noon, or between x&y time, because they
| want the scene to be cinematic, and it shows. Harsh
| fluorescent lighting on scenes with a doctor, muted, hazy
| interactions with a shady character or a scene with
| emotional turmoil, long shadows and lots of reds at the end
| of a story arc.
|
| It really feels like they put so much work into how
| everything _looks_ in the primary and secondary stories.
|
| i can agree though that just "jobbing" it looks more like a
| run-of-the-mill shooter, though.
| genewitch wrote:
| I bought cyberpunk when it released, i may have even pre-
| ordered, i don't remember. I played about 20 minutes after
| the title drop, you know the one. It was buggy, and didn't
| really look that good to me, on my samsung 4k monitor.
|
| I then played it again, on the same monitor, last year, and i
| was pleased with the gameplay, but again, i didn't find
| anything that remarkable about the overall graphics. the
| fidelity was great, especially at distance, due to 4k.
|
| I'm 50 hours deep in literally as i type this (about to
| launch the game), and this time, _this time_ it is completely
| different. I have an LG 2k HDR screen with "Smart HDR" and i
| finally - _finally_ - get it. Your eyes have to adjust just
| like in real life, to go from dark indoors to bright
| outdoors. you can see tail-lights and headlights in the
| mountains of NPCs driving around. lasers sweeping you are
| menacing.
|
| Even fallout 4, which is the first game i played in 4k 10
| years ago, looks easily 10 times better in HDR. And i only
| have the "vanilla+" mod set, 5GB of mods, not the 105GB
| modset.
|
| I coined the phrase 4 or 5 years ago, that HDR stood for: Hot
| Damn, Reds! and really, reds are still my least favorite
| part, they burn to deeply, but from watching several movies
| on an HDR 4k TV and being real unimpressed, to just these two
| games, my entire viewpoint has drastically changed.
|
| I didn't know you could put arbitrary people into photo mode
| in CP2077, and also pose them and move them around, so i was
| just entering photo mode as best i could and lighting and
| fiddling with the curves; however, these all took over 4
| seconds to "render" to the final image, which i found
| interesting: https://imgur.com/a/DTesuhF
| andybak wrote:
| > We don't need photorealism in games, but it does help with
| immersion.
|
| This is a blanket statement I would disagree with.
|
| > Many people, like me, feel like they are inside the game
| world, rather than playing a game with a TV/monitor in front
| of them
|
| I can't disagree with a statement about personal preference.
|
| So which is it?
| ryukoposting wrote:
| My take is that video game devs learn to aspire to cinema,
| since they're both making "entertainment art that exists on a
| screen" and cinema is more widely accepted as art among the
| intelligentsia (not that I agree).
| Tade0 wrote:
| This. To me one of the reasons why Coffee Stain Studios is such
| a successful publisher is that its games typically don't push
| for visual realism for the sake of it (hardly possible anyway
| when they feature dwarves, alien species and the like).
| simiones wrote:
| For the same reason it was searched for in painting for so
| long, and for the same reason movies and plays often
| meticulously recreate (or film in) real locales and use period-
| appropriate attire: people, by and large, love looking at
| reality way more than stylized images.
|
| There are exceptions, but the general public will almost always
| prefer a photo-realistic renaissance painting to a Picasso
| portrait, a lavish period piece like Titanic to an experimental
| set design like Dogville.
| windward wrote:
| Some games are sold just so the end user can enjoy exercising
| their new GPU and monitor. Crysis and Control come to mind.
| Arainach wrote:
| >Control
|
| Did we play the same game? Some of the best lore-building and
| environmental theming around, paired with some cool
| mechanics?
|
| Sure, the combat got repetitive but this was hardly something
| to "just sell GPUs"
| windward wrote:
| Nevertheless, it was commonly used for showing off (cloudy,
| particle-y) raytracing.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Yes but Control isn't sold "just so the end user can
| enjoy exercising their new GPU and monitor", it is sold
| for gamers to play a great game. And IMO it is Remedy's
| best game since Max Payne 2 (i haven't played Alan Wake 2
| though) because of its gameplay and atmosphere, not
| because of its visuals (which, do not get me wrong, are
| great, but that is largely because of the art direction
| and visual design, not because of raytracing -- in fact
| personally i first played and finished the game on an RX
| 5700 XT which has no raytracing at all and had to tone
| down a few visual effects, but still found the visuals
| great).
| windward wrote:
| I don't really see your point. It was used by
| benchmarking youtubers for that benchmarking, so it at
| least sold to them for that reason. It's also the reason
| I bought it: any later enjoyment is unrelated.
| Arainach wrote:
| Lots of things are used for benchmarking. Very few are
| made with it in mind.
|
| Crysis' system requirements at launch were so far above
| what most people had that I'll give you that. Control
| wasn't that way at all.
| theshackleford wrote:
| I don't really see _your_ point because you appear to be
| moving the goalposts.
|
| > Some games are sold just so the end user can enjoy
| exercising their new GPU and monitor.
|
| Being used "for benchmarking" and "being sold just" for
| that purpose are two very different things.
| teamonkey wrote:
| Control was one of the first big games to come out after
| Nvidia's first line of GPUs with raytracing hardware (RTX
| 20xx) and one of the first games to use those hardware
| features. That's why it was used as a showcase (there was
| probably a deal between Remedy and nvidia to make this
| happen, not sure).
|
| It was a good looking game at the time, but remember it
| originally came out on PS4/Xbox One and that version did
| NOT have raytracing.
| someuser2345 wrote:
| That's not the game I played.
|
| The lore was annoying to listen to; whenever I wanted to
| listen to an audio log, I had to stop playing the game and
| watch the exact same video of a man smoking and being
| mysterious.
|
| The cool game mechanics were basically just the gravity gun
| from Half Life 2, which came out over 20 years ago.
|
| It did have some cool environmental set pieces, but overall
| I just found the game too pretentious for something that
| was basically a rip off of the SCP wiki.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I was a bit confused by this aspect of control. It was
| lauded as an example of a top-tier graphics. I liked the
| game, but its graphics felt mid to me. Maybe due to the
| grey indoor environments?
| tmtvl wrote:
| Photorealism is a bad idea if your movement engine isn't good
| enough to handle the character walking around on uneven
| terrain. For racing games or flight simulators or such it is
| less of a problem, but seeing a regular person being absolutely
| flummoxed by a knee-high wall is massively immersion breaking.
|
| It's something I really noticed when playing Disaster Report 4,
| where the people look amazingly realistic but some restrictions
| are clearly just 'developers didn't make this bit walkable'.
| glitchc wrote:
| This is true in Wukong too, which is otherwise a very good-
| looking game. There are various points where rocks and
| scaffolds look just as climbable as those in the game area,
| yet the game engine places an invisible wall in your way. It
| breaks immersion instantly.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| I think it's more that they didn't have the display
| language to mark those inaccessible parts of the world as
| "boring", and prevent the player from wanting the walk into
| that invisible wall in the first place. Or placing the
| invisible wall 1m infront of a real wall for NO REASON.
|
| While also expecting you to go around searching for hidden
| goodies nd secret paths.
|
| I swear, the invisible walls are the only thing pushing it
| to a 9/10 from a 10/10 for me.
| Swizec wrote:
| > For racing games or flight simulators or such it is less of
| a problem,
|
| Cars are also easier to make photorealistic. Less uncanny
| valley effect, lots of flat shiny surfaces.
|
| What absolutely breaks immersion for me in most AAA car games
| is the absolute lack of crash, scratch, and dirt mechanics.
| Cars racing around the track for 2 hours don't look like
| showroom pieces! Make 'em dirty darn it. And when I crash
| into a wall ...
|
| I'm really excited to try Wreckfest 2 when I get around to
| it. Arcade-ish driving, not super photorealistic, they put it
| all on realistic soft body collision physics instead.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| You might like BeamNG.drive. It has soft-body physics
| simulation (also for driving dynamics, so it's not arcadey)
| and decent graphics. It's more like a sandbox with half-
| done "actual game" mods AFAIU, but happens to be quite
| popular and very highly rated anyway. I'm on the fence
| about buying it myself.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I had a great time recently on my first trip to a
| racetrack, and the most surprising thing to me was how all
| the cars were utterly beat to shit. Not like in a bad way,
| but in like... a sports gear way? They were all working
| (well, mostly, one guy had a real bad time on his second
| lap and I'm pretty sure his engine was DONE) but the panels
| were quite battered, and a number had full on body damage
| I'm assuming from track contact.
|
| And granted this was an amateur race day, just weekenders
| having a good time, but it makes sense when you think about
| it: if the body panels aren't like falling off and are just
| a bit beat up... why replace them? Especially on some of
| these cars (late model Corvettes and Mustangs) they don't
| come cheap at all, and they'll require refinishing and you
| have to do your livery over again too.
|
| Like a hockey player doesn't buy a new helmet every time
| they get hit, they/the team would be broke before the
| season was out.
| anthk wrote:
| Collin Mc Rae Rally 2 and 2005 did it fine for its era.
| What CMR2 did was incredible, the damages were very real.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I seem to recall hearing that car manufacturers only allow
| their vehicles to be licensed for use in games if they
| won't really get visually damaged. Kinda funny to see cars
| just bounce off each other in Gran Turismo. But rally games
| tend to be better at that (I may have lost a door or two
| (or a few dozen, but who's counting) in WRC).
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think it's like porn. Not sure about you guys, but for me
| soft-core always looks better than HD hardcore. Soft-core
| encourages imagination and conveniently covers any body part
| that is a bit far from perfect.
|
| And that's why I always think ladies who wear just enough
| clothes are way more sexy than nude ladies.
|
| Hopefully this doesn't offend anyone.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I get it, I prefer seeing two bears be tender and
| affectionate rather than just 'bend over and spell run'.
| ekianjo wrote:
| sales of games say otherwise. 2d pixel games have some
| occasional hits but the large number of games that make money
| go for more realism.
| braiamp wrote:
| > One big issue I never understood is why do we need
| photorealism in games at all
|
| Because WOW factor sells, specially if it's a new ip. You can
| see most trailers full of comments "this looks bad".
| __s wrote:
| Solar Ash is a good example of a non photorealistic 3d game
| lieks wrote:
| It's a lot easier to get a large team of artists to follow the
| same artstyle when that artstyle is just "realism". Also,
| photoscans are convenient.
| fleabitdev wrote:
| I've wondered whether photorealism creates its own demand.
| Players spend hours in high-realism game worlds, their eyes
| adjust, and game worlds from ten years ago suddenly feel wrong;
| not just old-fashioned, but fake.
|
| This is also true for non-photorealistic 3D games. They benefit
| from high-tech effects like outline shaders, sharp shadows,
| anti-aliasing and LoD blending - but all of that tech is
| improving over time, so older efforts don't look quite right
| any more, and today's efforts won't look quite right in 2045.
|
| When a game developer decides to step off this treadmill, they
| usually make a retro game. I'd like to see more deliberately
| low-tech games which aren't retro games. If modern players
| think your game looks good on downlevel hardware, then it will
| continue to look good as hardware continues to improve - I
| think this is one reason why Nintendo games have so much
| staying power.
|
| This has been the norm in 2D game development for ages, but
| it's much more difficult in 3D. For example, if the player is
| ever allowed to step outdoors, you'll struggle to meet modern
| expectations for draw distance and pop-in - and even if your
| game manages to have cutting-edge draw distance for 2025, who
| can say whether future players will still find it convincing?
| The solution is to only put things in the camera frustum when
| you know you can draw them with full fidelity; everything in
| the game needs to look as good as it's ever going to look.
| energy123 wrote:
| There is no "we". Some people like it some of the time.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah that's fair.
| pradn wrote:
| A large section of the gaming public sees photo-realistic games
| as serious, and prefers them for high-budget games. It's a rat
| race for devs though - its just incredibly expensive to create
| high quality models, textures, maps.
|
| I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and while the graphics are
| great, it's clear they could do more in the visual realm. It
| doesn't use current gen hardware to the maximum, in every way,
| because they also targeted last-gen consoles. I'm thinking in
| particular of the PS5s incredibly fast IO engine with
| specialized decompression hardware. In a game like Rachet and
| Clank: A Rift Apart, that hardware is used to jump you through
| multiple worlds incredibly quickly, loading a miraculous amount
| of assets. In Cyberpunk, you still have to wait around in
| elevators, which seem like diegetic loading screens.
|
| And also the general clunkiness of the animations, the way
| there's only like two or three body shapes that everyone
| conforms to - these things would go farther in creating a
| living/breathing world, in the visual realm.
|
| In other realms, the way you can't talk to everyone or go into
| every building is a bit of a bummer.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I think chasing photorealism also hurts the modding
| community, which hurts the players. No ordinary modding
| community could push out photorealistic contents in a
| realistic span of time. I think that's why we are seeing less
| and less mods nowadays comparing to the late 90s and early
| 2000s.
|
| For FPS, HL2/Doom3 is probably the last generation that
| enjoys a huge modding community. Anything above it pushes
| ordinary modders away. I believe it is still quite possible
| to make mods for say UE4, but it just took such a long time
| that the projects never got finished.
|
| In certain way, I so much wish the graphics froze by the year
| 2005.
| charcircuit wrote:
| HL2/Doom3 have built in mod support, so I don't think it's
| fair to compare it to games that don't have mod support.
| XCSme wrote:
| Let's see how GTA VI will change this and the industry.
|
| I personally like Cyberpunk's 2077 style, it looks great
| maxed out with HDR. Yes, the models aren't the best, but the
| overall look/vibe is spectacular at times.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > In Cyberpunk, you still have to wait around in elevators,
| which seem like diegetic loading screens.
|
| Cyberpunk has vanishingly few elevators. While it may be a
| loading hide in some spots, it's certainly not indicative of
| the game which otherwise has ~zero loading screens as you
| free roam the city including going in & out of _highly_
| detailed buildings and environments.
|
| > I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and while the graphics
| are great, it's clear they could do more in the visual realm.
| It doesn't use current gen hardware to the maximum
|
| I'm not sure how you can reach this conclusion to be honest.
| Cyberpunk 2077 continues to be the poster child of cutting
| edge effects - there's a reason Nvidia is _constantly_ using
| it for every new rendering tech they come out with.
| altairprime wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| After reading this article I feel like I learned nothing about
| what makes HDR good or bad.
| serd wrote:
| 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/
| freilanzer wrote:
| I cannot be the only who barely notices this in games.
| sgarland wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-ha...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Isn't Unreal Engine guilty with this? That's how I often
| recognize it's an Unreal Engine game.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I thought this was going to be the subject of the article. For
| years now, everything looks weirdly shiny.
| pradn wrote:
| Recently, some of it seems to be just to highlight raytracing
| hardware. Cyberpunk uses a lot of metal reflective surfaces to
| give a futuristic/tech vibe. But that's one sort of futurism.
| There'll be plenty of use of natural stone, wood, and tile far
| far into the future.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| It is amusing now that you point it out. There are always
| trends that come and go in these large scale industrial
| artforms. As others point out in this case likely a response to
| technical advancements and desire to emphasize those. Another
| example that would come to mind here is is the orangey-sunlit
| ears that seemed to show up everywhere to show off subsurface
| scattering.
|
| Thinking back - films also are always doing some new exciting
| thing all at once. That wild colored lighting aesthetic of the
| past decade comes to mind. That's a result of refined color
| correction software and awesome low-cost LED lights. Or drone
| shots. So many drone shots.
|
| It's usually a group-think phenomenon where everyone was
| previously unable to do something and now they can and everyone
| wants to try it. And then there are successes and management
| points at those and yells 'we want that, do that!', and
| distribution follows, and if becomes mandatory. Until everyone
| is rolling their eyes and excited about another new thing.
|
| It's a silly phenomenon when you think about it - any true
| artist-director would likely push back on that with a coherent
| vision.
| rasz wrote:
| Michael Mann starting with Thief (1981).
|
| "Mann sprayed down the city's nocturnal streets with tens of
| thousands of gallons of water, so that they took on an unreal,
| painterly glow." - New York Times
| dahart wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I made thermal prints (receipt printer) of concept art from
| _Pokemon Sun and Moon_ for the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, like
| this one
|
| 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.
| alt227 wrote:
| > definitely not Zelda nor GTA5.
|
| The zelda screenshot he uses as an example of how good things
| look without HDR, looks terrible to me. It is all washed out
| with brightness and bloom, and all the shadows in the landscape
| that in reality would almolst be black, are very light grey.
| XCSme wrote:
| I agree, it is washed out, and I was trying to find what
| exactly in the image the author really liked, but all I saw
| was a decolorated postcard.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For me games being too dark and not being able to see anything
| is a pet peeve. I can see the point in a horror game, but I
| will set the gamma or turn up the brightness if it makes the
| game hard to play.
| dahart wrote:
| Oh I agree. The art director needs to be exposing the
| important gameplay elements to be visible. That doesn't mean
| they should avoid blacks for everything though, and that's
| what all images except the RE7 image are doing.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| Out of my mind, the destiny 2 is the biggest offender of this
| category. If I can't see shit at all, how does the feeling
| artist trying to convince even matter? I will just turn the
| brightness in graphic card setting all the way up. Because
| the cap in in game setting is insanely low.
|
| Plus isn't not even a horror game. Come on, you are a shooter
| game. How does a shooter game that you can't see anything
| even make sense?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You're arguing that game engines should imitate photographic
| cameras, but they should imitate our eyes, which will never
| blow out whites outside in the sun.
| dahart wrote:
| Our eyes absolutely blow out whites in the sun. Doubly so
| when looking at the sun or even reflections immediately after
| being in the dark for a while, and when looking at bright
| that is very near dark in your visual field.
|
| I'm not necessarily arguing games should imitate cameras, I
| really only think over-compressing the dynamic range is bad,
| and I don't understand why the author is arguing for that.
| mystraline wrote:
| > Our eyes absolutely blow out whites in the sun.
|
| Do you have a new technique to decode eye-brain perception
| in terms of how we perceive visual signals? Do you have a
| paper indicating how you make this claim for everyone?
| dahart wrote:
| Do you really need a paper? It's well known that looking
| at the sun does damage to rods and cones, because it far
| exceeds their response range, long before perception gets
| involved.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Woah, the sun is bright? How do you know this is true for
| everyone? Do you have a peer reviewed RCT paper posted in
| a high impact journal confirming this?
| mystraline wrote:
| 'In the sun' != 'at the sun'
|
| And you completely miss what I'm asking too.
|
| Chemical reactions in the rods and cones are only a small
| portion of vision processing. The rest is in the brain,
| with a great deal of various processing happening, that
| eventually comes to cognition and understanding what you
| see.
|
| And parts of the visual cognition system also synthesize
| and hallucinate vision systems as well, like the vision
| hole where the optic nerve meets the eye. But
| cognitively, the data is there smeared across time and
| space (as in a SLAM algo putting the data where it should
| go, not what is measured).
| dahart wrote:
| What, exactly, is relevant about the perception and
| cognition systems if the signal from rods and cones is
| clipped or distorted? By 'blown out' we are talking about
| the rods and cones being saturated and unable to respond
| meaningfully. Your question doesn't make sense, and I'm
| neither making claims about nor arguing over what happens
| in the perceptual system to bad/saturated inputs.
|
| I don't know what you mean by 'in the sun' != 'at the
| sun'. I'm the one who said 'in the sun' and I was talking
| about staring at the sun. I'm not sure what your point
| is, but if you're trying to say that a game render of
| looking at the sun is different than the experience of
| actually looking at the sun, then I wholly agree. A game
| will (rightly and thankfully) never fully recreate the
| experience of looking at the sun. If you're trying to
| defend &carlosjobim's claim that human vision doesn't
| have an absolute upper luminance limit, then I think you
| need to back that claim up with some evidence.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It's a cloudy day here and I'm within my rather dimly lit
| office. If I look out the window, it is no problem to see
| clouds in all their details, and I don't loose any details
| within the darker environment in the room. A camera will
| either blow out the entire sky outside the window to
| capture the details in the room - or make the room entirely
| black to capture the details of the sky through the window.
|
| I mean, most people reading our comment thread here have
| their smart phone by their side and can instantly verify
| that eyes do not blow out whites or compress blacks like a
| camera. The dynamic range of our eyes is vastly superior to
| cameras. So aiming to imitate cameras is a mistake by game
| developers.
|
| Of course, staring straight into the sun or a very bright
| light or reflection is a different matter.
| dahart wrote:
| The first three pictures in the article have direct sun
| visible in the sky and not clipping. I was referring to
| that. The sun itself does blow out when you look directly
| at it, but please don't spend time staring at the sun as
| it will damage your eyes.
|
| The dynamic range of human eyes is not vastly superior to
| cameras. Look it up, or measure. It's easy to feel like
| eyes have more range because of adaptation, foveation,
| iris, etc.
|
| Again, I didn't argue that games should imitate cameras.
| But that would be better than what we have in games;
| movies look way better than the game screenshots in this
| article.
| epolanski wrote:
| It's not about being realistic but good looking.
| dahart wrote:
| Okay, the only image that looks "good" to me in terms of
| color handling is the RE7 image.
| epolanski wrote:
| Zelda is gorgeous.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The article is from 2017.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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-p...
|
| This is OLED gaming monitor that came out 2 years ago
| measures 904 nits on a 10% sustained white window.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > 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-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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Previously posted in 2017
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622
| qoez wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| slightly related but a lot of newer games have weird colour
| filtering and post processing effects now that drive me nuts
| ooterness wrote:
| 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
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