HDR Tech Demos [Archive]

bapenguin

11-12-2005, 05:03 AM

I mentioned a while back I wasn't impressed with Half-Life 2's implementation of HDR in Lost Coast. I mentioned I saw some HDR Tech demos that were far more imrepssive. I finally found them, so for those that are interested check this out here (http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/).

Check out how realistically the surfaces react in coordination with the HDR lighting. It REALLY gives the impression of realism. Note you need a DX9 card for this. (6800 or x800 or higher).

Suicidal ShiZuru

11-12-2005, 05:07 AM

Going to take a while to download. Looks good in the screenshtos though. Im not a huge fan of the current HDR though. Everything seems overly bright or glowing.

Holy shit. I just started it up and it looks freaking amazing. Now to actually play with it.

Qoz

11-12-2005, 05:17 AM

I used this to test my temperatures when overclocking my 6800GT.
It is extremely sensitive to math errors, and thus a good OC tester. Because it runs in a window, you can place the temperature window (from the nVidia driver) next to it and watch it go. It's a pure GPU burner.
:)

score

11-12-2005, 05:35 AM

Qoz,

just out of interest, what temps do you get at idle and full load?

Sion

11-12-2005, 06:14 AM

I want to see Alyx's ass in HDR /drool

Varsity

11-12-2005, 06:20 AM

See you in a couple of years, I take it? Even UE3 can't do it that well in a realtime environment.

Borys

11-12-2005, 06:28 AM

Bap, try Far Cry. It has the best HDR implementation out there. Going out from a dark, gloomy cave to a sunbathed beach really impressed me.

Captain Awesome

11-12-2005, 06:41 AM

Flarnet

11-12-2005, 07:02 AM

Valve has indeed done the best official implementation of tone mapping in a real game so far. But that's an easy task (even by Valve standards) since it's the ONLY official implementation in a real game so far.

Averic

11-12-2005, 07:03 AM

Worldcrafter

11-12-2005, 07:08 AM

See Borys, everyhone forgets how awsome the Crytek engin was. It was and still is one of the most beautiful engin out there. I am so pissed off companies did not pick it up.

It is still holding its own against all these new engins even after 2 years!

Agreed. I'm disappointed the Crytek engine didn't get more use, but I'm glad to see the Crytek Engine 2 looking fantastic. I can't wait to play Far Cry 2.

DanAmerson

11-12-2005, 07:45 AM

This is actually a fairly old demo. It's been around for at least a couple of years. I think the real difference here is that this tech demo is doing it's lighting via a light probe image versus a game engine that has to be able to pick up local light sources and react in real time. Image based-lighting will almost always look better, but it's a real pain in the ass to get the data, and that data is usually static. That's why a lot of the tech demos you see you the same half a dozen light probes from Debevec's group out of USC.

dba

TrackZero

11-12-2005, 08:09 AM

Awesome, thanks for the link bap!

bapenguin

11-12-2005, 08:58 AM

You're comparing a one room flat tech demo to what Valve did in a playable engine?

Bit a stretch there when the author only has to worry about a 3d pretzel floating in mid air. And no actual architecture being affected or player models for that matter.

Yeah this is good if you have one thing in there. But so far Valve has implemented the best in-game.

DOD:S using it rather well too.

I'm just saying that the in game HDR did not impress me. Maybe because I saw these tech demos first, but I was expecting a much more realistic looking effect. Especially on character models. Remember the HDR renders done with the HL2 models? They were badass, while I didn't expect the in game engine to produce something that convincing, I expected it to have SOME effect.

Borys - I'll be sure to check out Farcry, I played through quite a bit of a when it first came out, but I don't think it supported HDR then, right?

Captain Awesome

11-12-2005, 09:44 AM

I'm just saying that the in game HDR did not impress me. Maybe because I saw these tech demos first, but I was expecting a much more realistic looking effect. Especially on character models. Remember the HDR renders done with the HL2 models? They were badass, while I didn't expect the in game engine to produce something that convincing, I expected it to have SOME effect.

Borys - I'll be sure to check out Farcry, I played through quite a bit of a when it first came out, but I don't think it supported HDR then, right?

Those rendered shots were indeed great. But they werent real-time either. I understand what you're saying but what Valve did with Lost Coast is the first time anyone has used HDR in a real 3d engine. Lost Coast wasn't the "end" of it. Its their own test of it. Have you tried DOD:S with HDR on?

It's not as sensitive and overbearing at times like when you stare at the sky in Lost Coast. It uses it really well and it makes the gameplay in general alot cooler looking. Apparently CS:S will get the same treatment in HDR as DOD:S did. Which should be very interesting. That old hdr demo is great for demo purposes of the effect alone, but its nowhere indicative of what it would look like in a game. Far Cry's attempt was a hacked job and wasnt "real" HDR. It was just a re-worked Bloom effect. But it was nice at the time when nothing else had it in-game.

HDR is still well aways in the term of mainstream. People usually mix HDR up with Bloom. Which are 2 totally different lighting method. I like that they care about lighting this much. Which is usually my gripe in most games.

bapenguin

11-12-2005, 09:46 AM

Those rendered shots were indeed great. But they werent real-time either. I understand what you're saying but what Valve did with Lost Coast is the first time anyone has used HDR in a real 3d engine. Lost Coast wasn't the "end" of it. Its their own test of it. Have you tried DOD:S with HDR on?

Nope haven't tried DOD, I don't want to pay for it. And from the sound of it, Crytek had HDR first in Farcry.

Captain Awesome

11-12-2005, 09:50 AM

Nope haven't tried DOD, I don't want to pay for it. And from the sound of it, Crytek had HDR first in Farcry.

Farcry doesn't feature real HDR, just a very simple effect which only affects the bloom textures over some lights. HDR in general is a very new thing for developers and there are many ways of implementing but it takes a ton fo work.

We also need more powerful graphics cards to cope with it properly, then all art assets need to be stored as hd textures (that is floating point texture values), and to go back and do that to an exisiting game is a stupid amount of work. At the moment no game exists that has been built to use HDR from the ground up.

zeeeg

11-12-2005, 10:05 AM

Do I have to do something special to enable HDR in farcry? I was just playing it a few weeks ago (when I put my new system together) and remember maxxing all the graphical options out and it certainly didn't hold up to modern games at all. Didn't notice any Lost Coast style effects whatsoever. Some blooming. Am I doing something wrong or are you guys crazy.

Oh and I saw those HDR tech demos a while before I played Lost Coast.. Lost Coast is still impressive (mainly because I would never link a tech demo of spinning shiny things with in-game graphics in my mind). Personally I think they went too far with it in Lost Coast, it's actually distracting. DoD:Source has it just right.

Captain Awesome

11-12-2005, 10:09 AM

UnderHero5

11-12-2005, 10:37 AM

bapenguin, you're not alone. I wasn't impressed with the HDR that Valve has done either. I also own DoD:S, so I've seen it used in more than just the Lost Coast.
It's a somewhat neat effect, but it's almost a stretch calling it HDR.
All it does is apply a bloom effect then saturate/desaturate the brightness of the scene depending on what you look at. I wouldn't call that HDR, but I guess that's just me.

And I really don't see why it gives such a performance hit (at higher resolutions) for what little it does.

Like I said, it's a "neat" effect, but I honestly don't see the big deal... people act like it makes the games 100x better looking... The only thing I've noticed that it actually makes look nicer is water. The way the bloom/saturation works on the reflective surface of water is nice... but with player models/the environment, it's not all that impressive to me.

It's still nice having it as an option though, as the more options the better, and it's nice for the people who like to use it. That said I might use it in single player games, but it really makes some area's in DoD:S difficult to see in when you walk around a corner and everything's so saturated with bloom/light that you can't even see an enemy standing up agaisnt that super bright wall. I'll likely never use it in online games unless I'm forced to.

Borys

11-12-2005, 10:46 AM

Borys - I'll be sure to check out Farcry, I played through quite a bit of a when it first came out, but I don't think it supported HDR then, right?

Exactly - patch added it. It looks really awesome and surprising for such an old game. The patch you are looking for is 1.3 version and you have to have a SM 3.0 card to run it.

Suicidal ShiZuru

11-12-2005, 10:51 AM

Dont you have to enable it somehow? Can you tell me how? I have it patched and havent played in a while.

Qoz

11-12-2005, 10:51 AM

#score
Well.. when I tested I had just installed an Arctic Cooling solution. And my case contain soundproof sides making the temperature go up. The good thing about the Arctic cooling is the fact that the heat is somewhat pushed out the back.
Anyway. my conclusion was that I could not overclock anything because of the mentioned. We (Denmark) had a really hot week in the summertime where I had to actually under-clock it or keep the side open. That sucked.
But the computer is almost completely silent which is very important for me when I'm working at home.
Right now at idle state (and closed case) it is GPU = 65c and Ambient = 48c.

Borys

11-12-2005, 10:51 AM

Here's a great article (20 pages!) on Far Cry's HDR implementation.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/farcry13.html

You have to enable it in the console, you can also fool with the settings somewhat to make it really unnatural looking (for example: overbright the sun) and be wary: framerate goes down 30% with HDR enabled.

Opty

11-12-2005, 11:16 AM

If I'm correct, Valve's HDR uses Shader Model 2.x (not sure if it's 2.0 or something else), which means a greater range of cards can use it through hardware. FarCry's is SM 3.0 so you need a pretty new card to run it. If you turn it up all the way and don't have the proper shaders I think it might do it in software, but don't quote me on that. If it does though, then that would be a huge performance hit for little gain.

As a note, these tech demos linked are the ones Microsoft links to from the DirectX SDK Sample Browser as an example of HDR. It's definitely just a pretty demo piece, not something that can be done in-game right now.

F3nyx

11-12-2005, 11:30 AM

Borys - I'll be sure to check out Farcry, I played through quite a bit of a when it first came out, but I don't think it supported HDR then, right?Added in a patch, I'm pretty sure.

Murtaug

11-12-2005, 11:31 AM

Borys:

Nice article, but it would be even more so if all the images within it were not broken.

RMan

11-12-2005, 11:32 AM

We also need more powerful graphics cards to cope with it properly, then all art assets need to be stored as hd textures (that is floating point texture values)
This is not true. Only the art assets that need high range values need this (so basically static sky images and the like), normal textures do not need to represent high range colors.

Leaving Hope

11-12-2005, 11:59 AM

Thanks, Bapenguin.

ElectricMonk

11-12-2005, 12:02 PM

i thought the lost coast did a great job of implementing hdr. it was understated and realistic.

i don't see what's so great about going overboard with something. works fine in a tech demo but if everything was overly glaring and blurry it wouldn't work in a real game.

Morrolan

11-12-2005, 12:57 PM

HRD will be the next gen's ragdoll physics. Or, if you prefer, the next gen's light bloom. It will take a while before developers learn to use it tastefully. For the first year or two, everything will be as shiny as shit.

Borys

11-12-2005, 01:31 PM

Borys:

Nice article, but it would be even more so if all the images within it were not broken.

Hey I'm here to help:

(especially check the Overbright shots)
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njc4LDQ=

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/far_cry_1.3_midrange/

Bubby

11-12-2005, 03:17 PM

Note you need a DX9 card for this. (6800 or x800 or higher).

Runs fine here on my DX9 6600GT.

score

11-12-2005, 03:21 PM

#Qoz

cool...

I used to idle at 62c, but always felt that my temps were too high. Some games, after a period of time would make my machine reboot. I recently added a zalman VF700 vga cooler and am now idling at 58c (its silent as well). Its made a bigger difference to temps at load and haven't had any machine reboots but saying that, it has got a whole lot cooler recently, weather wise...

Mason

11-12-2005, 03:56 PM

I just don't see where you're going with this, bap. It's a tech demo with a light probe HDR technique that's not really a comfortable fit for a game engine, applied to a single model. That's neat and all, but what does it have to do with the HL2 engine? Apples and oranges.

What's next, some badass ray-traced images from the 80s?

grunter

11-12-2005, 06:29 PM

This is hardly front page news and apart from the letters H, D and R, not even close to being relevant to the HL2 implementation of in game HDR. :confused:

bapenguin

11-12-2005, 07:01 PM

This is hardly front page news and apart from the letters H, D and R, not even close to being relevant to the HL2 implementation of in game HDR. :confused:

It's the weekend, there really isn't gaming news. This is a graphic tech demo that shows what HDR can do. I thought it would interest some people...and strike up conversation. And look...it did.

Thin_J

11-13-2005, 01:26 AM

I thought it would interest some people...and strike up conversation. And look...it did.

You'll just have to forgive him this one bap. He was so busy trolling he didn't realize people were having a conversation.

grunter

11-13-2005, 03:12 AM

You'll just have to forgive him this one bap. He was so busy trolling he didn't realize people were having a conversation.

Oh the irony. Thanks for your contribution. ;)

I guess I'm to used to jumping on to EA quickly and being served relevant gaming news items in "News Items" on the front end.

Normally would head for the general forums if I have more time and for non news worthy items ala this thread.

51|RandoM

11-13-2005, 12:45 PM

There is more than one thing you can use HDR for, don't forget.

I think how they(valve) simulate your eye contracting/expanding when moving from light to dark/dark to light is freaking great. We can finally have blown highlights and complete darkness... while still having those two affected/modified/created by dynamic lighting.

Think about that, then think about games with night missions. think about sitting around staring at the campfire---thus ruining your night vision for a period of time---then hearing something outside the ring of firelight. You whip around, trying to see it, but everything is black. You follow the noises through the undergrowth, while slowly you recover your nightvision, only, once it recovers, you find yourself boxed in by a pair of velociraptors.

HDR is a big win for people who want immersion in their gaming experience, no doubt about it in my mind.

The people who seem least impressed are the online diehards who want a steady 120FPS and turn up their gamma to find campers in the shadows.