Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)

Real life has a lot of sensations that games don't. A rainy/foggy day might look boring, but it feels nice to be out in (ideally). Well, that and computer audio is/can be about as good as humans can perceive, but displays are nowhere near it.

So both of these mean you have to jack up the sensation so people can feel something.

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.

>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.

From what I understood is that these are supposedly bad because they look like video games instead of photographs. Not sure what the problem with that is though. I'm fine with video games looking like video games.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

It looks like a cheap film camera or a home video screenshot. So it gives off a feeling of nostalgia to a sufficiently old person, but this is also the kind of photo you'd reject as a pro, because it's totally overexposed.

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.

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.

It's not about being realistic but good looking.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

Some games are sold just so the end user can enjoy exercising their new GPU and monitor. Crysis and Control come to mind.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

Isn’t Unreal Engine guilty with this? That’s how I often recognize it’s an Unreal Engine game.

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

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.

I thought this was going to be the subject of the article. For years now, everything looks weirdly shiny.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

Any examples of good HDR in games?

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.

So were 3d movies until they stopped filming in 3d and started adding pointless effects in postprocessing :)