Hardware News

ShackNews Visits Valve

Joe "OuTkAsT-1" Topolnisky

2005-09-16 00:04:00.0


After spending the day at Valve Software's head offices, Shack News has fired-up an article taking a look at their new High Dynamic Range rendering technology, Episodic content and a whole lot more. Here's some juice:

One of the most visually impressive parts of HDR is that it allows higher light values than would normally be allowed in a game engine for surfaces that aren't very reflective. For example, consider sand on a beach that is in general 20% reflective. Without HDR, that sand would only be able to use 20% of your monitor's maximum brightness, leading to a fairly low contrast range. However, in reality, the sun is such an incredibly powerful source of light that on a bright clear day, it will still cause quite a lot of light to reflect off of the beach, and can have a blown out white effect; this is represented in the game. The same goes for water; if the sky is very bright, the water will reflect it as such.

Read on!

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