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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.

I made thermal prints (receipt printer) of concept art from Pokémon Sun and Moon for the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, like this one

https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741

and found they did really well because the art was designed to look good on bad screens and poor viewing conditions. I think of it in terms of Ansel Adam's Zone theory in that the ideal image is (1) legible if you quantize it to 11 tones of grey (looks OK printed in the newspaper), but (2) has meaningful detail in most or all of those zones.

I'm kinda disappointed that the Nintendo 3DS version didn't use the stereo effects but they would have had to decided if her hair forms a sheet or a cone.

> 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.

I agree, it is washed out, and I was trying to find what exactly in the image the author really liked, but all I saw was a decolorated postcard.

His argument is that it looks like something someone would paint and I quite agree with that.

His arguement is:

> There’s none of that awful heavy handed contrast. No crushed blacks. No randomly saturated whites in the sunset, and saturation overall stays where it belongs across the luminance range.

I disagree strongly with all of this. The blacks are crushed hard, they are just crushed to a light grey instead of a dark black. The saturation is washed out, to the point where all the colours are forced into a very limited colour range. It just looks terrible, and if someone painted this I would say the same thing about it.

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.

Oh I agree. The art director needs to be exposing the important gameplay elements to be visible. That doesn’t mean they should avoid blacks for everything though, and that’s what all images except the RE7 image are doing.

Out of my mind, the destiny 2 is the biggest offender of this category. If I can't see shit at all, how does the feeling artist trying to convince even matter? I will just turn the brightness in graphic card setting all the way up. Because the cap in in game setting is insanely low.

Plus isn't not even a horror game. Come on, you are a shooter game. How does a shooter game that you can't see anything even make sense?

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.

Our eyes absolutely blow out whites in the sun. Doubly so when looking at the sun or even reflections immediately after being in the dark for a while, and when looking at bright that is very near dark in your visual field.

I’m not necessarily arguing games should imitate cameras, I really only think over-compressing the dynamic range is bad, and I don’t understand why the author is arguing for that.

> Our eyes absolutely blow out whites in the sun.

Do you have a new technique to decode eye-brain perception in terms of how we perceive visual signals? Do you have a paper indicating how you make this claim for everyone?

Do you really need a paper? It’s well known that looking at the sun does damage to rods and cones, because it far exceeds their response range, long before perception gets involved.

Woah, the sun is bright? How do you know this is true for everyone? Do you have a peer reviewed RCT paper posted in a high impact journal confirming this?

'In the sun' != 'at the sun'

And you completely miss what I'm asking too.

Chemical reactions in the rods and cones are only a small portion of vision processing. The rest is in the brain, with a great deal of various processing happening, that eventually comes to cognition and understanding what you see.

And parts of the visual cognition system also synthesize and hallucinate vision systems as well, like the vision hole where the optic nerve meets the eye. But cognitively, the data is there smeared across time and space (as in a SLAM algo putting the data where it should go, not what is measured).

What, exactly, is relevant about the perception and cognition systems if the signal from rods and cones is clipped or distorted? By ‘blown out’ we are talking about the rods and cones being saturated and unable to respond meaningfully. Your question doesn’t make sense, and I’m neither making claims about nor arguing over what happens in the perceptual system to bad/saturated inputs.

I don’t know what you mean by ‘in the sun’ != ‘at the sun’. I’m the one who said ‘in the sun’ and I was talking about staring at the sun. I’m not sure what your point is, but if you’re trying to say that a game render of looking at the sun is different than the experience of actually looking at the sun, then I wholly agree. A game will (rightly and thankfully) never fully recreate the experience of looking at the sun. If you’re trying to defend &carlosjobim’s claim that human vision doesn’t have an absolute upper luminance limit, then I think you need to back that claim up with some evidence.

It's a cloudy day here and I'm within my rather dimly lit office. If I look out the window, it is no problem to see clouds in all their details, and I don't loose any details within the darker environment in the room. A camera will either blow out the entire sky outside the window to capture the details in the room - or make the room entirely black to capture the details of the sky through the window.

I mean, most people reading our comment thread here have their smart phone by their side and can instantly verify that eyes do not blow out whites or compress blacks like a camera. The dynamic range of our eyes is vastly superior to cameras. So aiming to imitate cameras is a mistake by game developers.

Of course, staring straight into the sun or a very bright light or reflection is a different matter.

The first three pictures in the article have direct sun visible in the sky and not clipping. I was referring to that. The sun itself does blow out when you look directly at it, but please don’t spend time staring at the sun as it will damage your eyes.

The dynamic range of human eyes is not vastly superior to cameras. Look it up, or measure. It’s easy to feel like eyes have more range because of adaptation, foveation, iris, etc.

Again, I didn’t argue that games should imitate cameras. But that would be better than what we have in games; movies look way better than the game screenshots in this article.

I can compare my eyes to a camera everywhere I go, because I carry a smartphone in my pocket. And so do most people. My eyes can handle scenes with varying brightness much better than any camera, and the reason is probably that cameras have to take still pictures while the eyes receive a continuous feed. Even shooting film or video, cameras still work by a series of still pictures.

> Again, I didn’t argue that games should imitate cameras. But that would be better than what we have in games; movies look way better than the game screenshots in this article.

I agree, but movie makers take care to avoid having visible over or under exposure in scenes. And they do other things that take away from realism, but makes the movie better looking. If they aimed for total realism, any movie would just look like a soap opera.

> 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.

It's not about being realistic but good looking.

Okay, the only image that looks “good” to me in terms of color handling is the RE7 image.

Zelda is gorgeous.