HDR bit option

[Czechnmymail]

HDR is a system in which colors are internally represented and calculated at a higher precision than the precision at which they are output. This extra information allows various lighting effects (like the ever-popular bloom) to be added to simulate light that is brighter than your monitor's maximum brightness (#FFFFFF, of course.) That is IT. In the end, the actual dynamic range is still compressed from 0-255 for each component, but they lighting effects can trick your eyes. And HDR and AA are not supported together in Unreal Engine 3 because UE3 uses a technique called Deferred Shading, as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to simplify its rendering pipeline, and it is an incompatibility between deferred shading and AA that is the core of the problem here.

A point of confusion here is that there is also an unrelated incompatibility in older nVidia GPUs between any HDR rendering and anti-aliasing.

[Kronos]

HDR and AA are not supported together in Unreal Engine 3 because UE3 uses a technique called Deferred Shading, as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to simplify its rendering pipeline, and it is an incompatibility between deferred shading and AA that is the core of the problem here.

Steve Polge already said HDR and AA work together on Unreal Engine 3 with Dx10.

[Kea]

I saw the term FSAA used together with AA not being supported together HDR in DX9 (because of the lack of sufficient hardware control through the exposed API), but I still wonder why *just* rendering at a higher resolution, downmixing to a displayable X8R8G8B8 format before letting the hardware downscale to screen resolution is impossible.

[Czechnmymail]

Kronos: Oh yeah. I don't know how I completely forgot about the DX10 path. Sadly, nobody will use it anyway. I planned on it, but then I realized how horrible Vista's gaming performance is right now compared to XP.

[Moloko]

Kronos: Oh yeah. I don't know how I completely forgot about the DX10 path. Sadly, nobody will use it anyway. I planned on it, but then I realized how horrible Vista's gaming performance is right now compared to XP.

We'll wait and see, sure the early titles and patched dx9-10 hybrid games blow framerate wise, but as the new API is better understood and exploited by developers I'd expect DX10 Vista to get up off its knees.

[ummester]

So, how do you turn defferred lighting off?

Or, is there an Unreal engine patch for the old Far-Cry, Half Life 2 type HDR?

For me, I honestly can't see an improvement in UT3s HDR to HL2 Ep2s HDR and the Source engine lets you use AA with its.

We need an openGL mod for UT3. Framerates would improve accross the board.