Half-Life 2: Lost Coast to support HDR!

[combatc87]

That's right kids, the expansion to Half-Life 2 will support HDR. Also (don't you love curveballs), the Source version of Day of Defeat will also support HDR.

Take from Planet Half-Life.

"We're getting much closer to having Lost Coast ready to release. Originally planned as a section of the Highway 17 chapter of Half-Life 2, Lost Coast is a playable technology showcase that introduces High Dynamic Range lighting to the Source engine.

Once Lost Coast is released, we will include HDR in our future product releases. For instance, Day of Defeat: Source will feature HDR lighting for all of its levels the day it is released.

One of the fundamental pieces of HDR rendering lies in "dynamic tonemapping." In the Source engine, by varying the exposure of a scene based on how much light is visible, we can accurately simulate a range of brightness that is beyond what a computer monitor is physically capable of displaying. A real-world example of this effect happens every time you walk from a very dark room to an outdoor area with very bright sunlight -- your eye takes a few moments to adjust to the variance in the amount of light hitting the retina. If you have a video card that supports HDR, you'll be able to see this in the engine when Lost Coast is released."

There's also a video in the news post that showcases this feature.

 

[Kage]

Wow... I know one thing though. it'll make the game seem alot more realistic...

Would the expansion pack then allow you to play the whole game like that?

Well...i know one thing... my card doesn't support it

 

[wiktorek01]

What would be the cheapest, like lowest kind of video card that can support it???

 

[combatc87]

Well I know that my card that's in the mail right now, a GeForce 7800 GTX will support it. I think the Radeon x850 Platinum Edition does too.

 

[Kage]

Yeah, though the 7800GTX is a great card

Look for a card when searching, that has CineFX 4.0 on it if its a Geforce card.
This will tell you that it supports HDR If its a lower version of CineFX then it won't

I don't know how to check for ATI cards (the format used), though I don't even think they can support it yet.
Am I right?
and if they do, what do they call the archiecture (like Nvidia uses CineFX for advanced settings)?

CINEFX 4.0:

"NVIDIA® CineFX™ 4.0 Shading Architecture

• Vertex Shaders
° Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
° Displacement mapping
° Geometry instancing
° Infinite length vertex programs
• Pixel Shaders
° Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
° Full pixel branching support
° Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
° Infinite length pixel programs
• Next-Generation Texture Engine
° Accelerated texture access
° Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
° Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
° Support for non-power of two textures
° Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
° DirectX and S3TC texture compression

• Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes"

The 128-bit floating point is what gives it HDR functionality by the way as one with this can have much better control over colour and brightness of pixels without messing any other pixels up which it isn't meant to do, and a lower floating point would do (32bpp for example) which would cause leakage in brightness.

 

[rdcmmnst]

if you pay anything over 300 for a card it better be good.

 

[combatc87]

One thing about HDR (though it shouldn't matter) is that it doesn't support Anti-Aliasing, but, like I said, that shouldn't make any difference cause the HDR does the job.

 

[alvino]

Yeah, though the 7800GTX is a great card

Look for a card when searching, that has CineFX 4.0 on it if its a Geforce card.
This will tell you that it supports HDR If its a lower version of CineFX then it won't

I don't know how to check for ATI cards (the format used), though I don't even think they can support it yet.
Am I right?
and if they do, what do they call the archiecture (like Nvidia uses CineFX for advanced settings)?

CINEFX 4.0:

"NVIDIA® CineFX™ 4.0 Shading Architecture

• Vertex Shaders
° Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
° Displacement mapping
° Geometry instancing
° Infinite length vertex programs
• Pixel Shaders
° Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
° Full pixel branching support
° Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
° Infinite length pixel programs
• Next-Generation Texture Engine
° Accelerated texture access
° Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
° Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
° Support for non-power of two textures
° Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
° DirectX and S3TC texture compression

• Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes"

The 128-bit floating point is what gives it HDR functionality by the way as one with this can have much better control over colour and brightness of pixels without messing any other pixels up which it isn't meant to do, and a lower floating point would do (32bpp for example) which would cause leakage in brightness.

Yeah, nVIDIA is the current Graphics Card King (a well deserved position), until ATI's R520 comes out I've heard that the R520 is gonna be 24 or 32 pipelines (something like that...)

 

[rdcmmnst]

why is radeon always a step behind?

 

[Kage]

I don't know.

Do ATi have as much tech working for them to produce as much arcetecture for there cards like cinefx and stuff like Nvidia do?

One company has always got to be ahead though if you think about it, as one company strudes the rest onwards as well. The fact that Nvidia starts the revolution is a good thing, which on the new cards, Ati follows suit on. Its been a very long time since Ati has been at the barrel of an idea and shot it before Nvidia have anway. Get what I mean?

Ati are still behind on Direct x-c support as well since no new cores have come out for a while to support them, which Nvidia started doing when it first arrived.

So Geometry Instancing for example (one effect) for games like Farcry are not available yet on Ati cards... and what this effect does is basically renders 1 tree (or any object to be produced in the hundreds) and copies this one rendered tree over and over using an algorithm so it doesn't have to be rendered again, and I'm sure with Ati cards, they have to be, so far.
So thats one effect ATi are missing out on...I'm sure there are a couple of other good ones in the C part of DX-9