Thread: HDR rendering in games

  1. #1
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    HDR rendering in games

    I just recently bought a game that does HDR lighting. To me it looks cool but there are a lot of jaggies making it look like a very cool 640x480 game that has HDR.

    My card is a GeForce 7800 GS AGP 256. Surely this can do floating point render targets so I can get rid of the jaggies right? The game looks great except the post processing effects actually deter from the quality rather than contribute to it.

    Anyone else have this problem on HDR games?

  2. #2
    Ethernal Noob
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    Which is the game? What kind of processor do you have

    *crosses finger and hopes it's not Stalker.*

    The only game I've really played that has HDR lost coast and I just turn up the anti-aliasing nad it looks fine.

  3. #3
    The Right Honourable psychopath's Avatar
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    You'll notice this anywhere a game or application uses post-processing and render buffers, HDR or not. Even if you have floating-point precision, the aliasing likely won't go away, because at the moment, there's no way to do regular hardware anti-aliasing of render targets (FBOs on OGL, not sure of the D3D equiv.). The best that can be done is to code it into the post-processing shader, but this generally turns out to be too costly (depending on your hardware).
    M.Eng Computer Engineering Candidate
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  4. #4
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    So what's the point of making it look cool if it will cause the display to lose resolution?

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    The Right Honourable psychopath's Avatar
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    Depends on your preference I guess. There's definatly a trade-off.

    Hopefully the hardware will soon provide native AA for this sort of thing.
    M.Eng Computer Engineering Candidate
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  6. #6
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Well I fixed the problem. It was not FSAA or the HDR that was causing the problem. The entire game looked like one giant billboard and it sucked. They put in a feature called pixel doubling which essentially reduces the resolution by simply repeating pixels. They also had a screen filtering option which emulated FSAA.

    Well since I had all of the options checked it was doing HDR filtering, FSAA, pixel doubling, and filtering the screen all with vsync enabled.

    I unchecked pixel doubling, filter screen, and vsync enable and the game looks absolutely fantastic. It seems some of the folks at gamespot also had all this enabled because they complain about blurry textures, blurry screens, etc. If only they realized they were causing it and not the game. The engine for the game is fantastic. It really pushes a lot of polies and looks far better than anything I've seen to date including X3. X3 pushes polies but not as elegantly as this engine.

    People are so hard on games today it's impossible to get good reviews or unbiased reviews. Just because a game doesn't have everything a person wants does not make it a bad game. Just because game A is not like game B does not make game B better than A. The only argument I could see against this game that's valid is......it's not like Frelancer or X3. Well no kidding Sherlock maybe that's because it isn't either one of those. The game is called Spaceforce. Tons of bad reviews but I actually like the game.

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