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[H]ard's New Article on FarCry patch 1.3 & SM3.0
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Snowman, I usually read your posts with earnest, but you've posted this shoddy reply three times. what are you getting at? please stop being a cryptic dillhole! 🙂
are you trying to say that in the case of Farcry, but not HL2 or other examples, that HDR would have been impossible through any means on an x800 core? if that is what you are trying to say, please spell it out so we can debunk it.
😉
mario
MercenaryForHire
Lifer
Don't even bother, gururu. I gave up on trying to explain it to him in the other HDR FarCry post, but he seems to think that "SM3 makes complex coding (example HDR) easier" means the same as "OMGWTFBBQ SM3 IS REQUIRED FOR HDR"
- M4H
- M4H
kylebisme
Diamond Member
MercenaryForHire, I never claimed that you thought SM3 was required, I just doubted your arguments that SM3 helps the HDR as you were never clear on how you though this was the case but rather only listed general benifits of SM3 which I knew may or may not apply to the HDR in Far Cry. Regardless, I just checked out the shader files for Far Cry and all of the HDR shaders are PS2.0; so your whole line of argument is clearly wrong on the face.
How you say I am being cryptic when I am simply asking for clairfication of your statement? From what I understand, a floating point famebuffer is simply required to carry an HDR effect though alpha channels; and since Far Cry is full of textures with alpha channels, I am at a loss as to what methods you are implying Crytek could have used to make the effect work in their game with cards that do not support a floating point famebuffer.
I'm not one to say anything is impossable, but I not aware of any way which the effect could be accomplished in Far Cry or any other situation with transparent textues unless you have a floatingpoint framebuffer. If you are aware of a practical method to accomplish this; please tell us what that method is as I am sure that Cry Tek, John Carmack who requested floatingpoint framebuffer support quite a while back, and many other developers would like to know.
How you say I am being cryptic when I am simply asking for clairfication of your statement? From what I understand, a floating point famebuffer is simply required to carry an HDR effect though alpha channels; and since Far Cry is full of textures with alpha channels, I am at a loss as to what methods you are implying Crytek could have used to make the effect work in their game with cards that do not support a floating point famebuffer.
I'm not one to say anything is impossable, but I not aware of any way which the effect could be accomplished in Far Cry or any other situation with transparent textues unless you have a floatingpoint framebuffer. If you are aware of a practical method to accomplish this; please tell us what that method is as I am sure that Cry Tek, John Carmack who requested floatingpoint framebuffer support quite a while back, and many other developers would like to know.
thanks, that's a little clearer. all i know is that ATi cards have supported HDR since their first line of DX 9.0 cards hit the market. in fact, they have a demo showing just that. the link I posted in an earlier post also clearly demonstrates how HDR effects can be employed with hardware at that time (which included the R300 core but not the FX series). So I don't know what you are getting at. To be honest, you, Crytek, and Carmack should consult Gabe Newell to determine how to do it.
Gamingphreek
Lifer
Pwned. Seems like stnicralisk doesn't know what he is talking about and Pray for Death and Gamingphreek (Myself) do.
-Kevin
kylebisme
Diamond Member
No, I am saying that HDR cannot be done though an alpha channel's transparency with Ati hardware or any other hardware that does not support a floating point framebufer. Look at this pic here and note the vegitation. The vegitation is done with simple polygons textured with transparent areas to give the of the little leaves. To carry that HDR though the transparncy the floatingpoint framebuffer is employed, without that floating point frame buffer the transparent part showing vegitation textues would look washed out like the left side of the image. So sure you could they could let us use HDR in Far Cry on Ati's DX9 cards, but it would look like crap.
Half-Life 2 doesn't do HDR, as far as I know. It has some DX9 functionality, but it doesn't execute a realistic HDR representation as FarCry does (there are some light shafts on de_chateau in CS:S that are not HDR, nor does it offer any FarCry-style HDR shifts (that washout to clarity example someone gave was brilliant, I'm sure it looks better in motion than in a few screen grabs)). Of course, Valve is a huge ATI flunky, so at the most SM2.0B will be used in HL2, while SM3.0 will be utterly ignored and nVidia's floating point framebuffer will be left unused for HDR implementation.
I imagine that nVidia will fix the "no AA with HDR" issue with NV50, since apparently a ton of people hate not having AA while using HDR. Or it just may be the way FarCry's OEXR method is coded, since I don't think nVidia would design a system that only works for the barest functionality of a feature; it's wholly possible that the code is merely bloated or inefficient and takes up too much space to write AA samples to the framebuffer while HDR is being executed. Considering the game is DX9-based, I'm inclined to believe that the bloated code explanation is actually true. *hates DX code*
I imagine that nVidia will fix the "no AA with HDR" issue with NV50, since apparently a ton of people hate not having AA while using HDR. Or it just may be the way FarCry's OEXR method is coded, since I don't think nVidia would design a system that only works for the barest functionality of a feature; it's wholly possible that the code is merely bloated or inefficient and takes up too much space to write AA samples to the framebuffer while HDR is being executed. Considering the game is DX9-based, I'm inclined to believe that the bloated code explanation is actually true. *hates DX code*
Well, I believe I said that I hadn't heard anything about HDR in HL2, and I was talking about my experience with CS:S (which, being based on HL2, should be a decent indicator of what HL2 will look like). The article you linked still mentions HL2 as the most anticipated game of 2003, so it may be possible that HDR was removed for some reason during a later beta build (and/or may not be present at all in CS:S). Or it just may be that the effect isn't really all that pronounced, since I don't notice half of these little niggling things unless someone specifically points it out to me (like I never noticed mipmap transitions until someone complained and posted a screenshot of the transitions).
PrayForDeath
Diamond Member
It's interesting to see games built on the SandBox engine (or whatever it's called), have anyone heard of such upcoming games?
Also, I though HDR in HL2 had been shelved, at least temporarily, for whatever reasons. This despite the fact that they had solved initial problems with the FX series and got it working with not even floats, but just ints. Odd, if true (both in terms of the range of FX12 HDR, and ditching it [perhaps related to translucent textures]).
In response to several comments.
Older hardware (9X00's and FX) can do a lesser form of hdr using only ints, this was going into HL2 at one point. However only 6*00's can do HDR of the quality implemented in farcry 1.3. 6800's won't be able to implement multi-sampling anti-aliasing as well because both it and hdr use the same buffer - take your pick. HDR is not part of the SM3.0 spec, however there are a image quality enhancing things that are such as displacement mapping. 3dc is a normal compresion algorithm that works a little better then (tweaked) DXTC5, which is the algorithm used in Doom 3, and added as beta to farcry. 3dc doesn't get used yet because it only works on the X800 hardware and isn't in the direct X spec (DXTC5 is).
Older hardware (9X00's and FX) can do a lesser form of hdr using only ints, this was going into HL2 at one point. However only 6*00's can do HDR of the quality implemented in farcry 1.3. 6800's won't be able to implement multi-sampling anti-aliasing as well because both it and hdr use the same buffer - take your pick. HDR is not part of the SM3.0 spec, however there are a image quality enhancing things that are such as displacement mapping. 3dc is a normal compresion algorithm that works a little better then (tweaked) DXTC5, which is the algorithm used in Doom 3, and added as beta to farcry. 3dc doesn't get used yet because it only works on the X800 hardware and isn't in the direct X spec (DXTC5 is).
kylebisme
Diamond Member
Both the 9X00's and FX's can do HDR with floating point color calculations, as can be seen in rthdribl and I'm pretty sure the HL2 HDR example used floating point color calculations on Radeons as well. It is the use of the floatingpoint framebuffer that makes the HDR in Far Cry different.
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