Half-Life HDR preview

[FarFarAway]

Bit-Tech have got a pretty sweet preview of the upcoming Valve add-on for Half Life.

This is HDR. HDR is High Dynamic Range. This extends to lighting and shader effects. Its an Ultra-realistic version of lighting that gives you glare if you go from dark to light (much life going into the sun givces you sligfht glare).

Farcry already has this feature and it looks absolutely immense if you enable it. It really stresses the GPU out tho gives me 1/2 the framerate

Here's a nice example of HDR showing a tre at different sun positions:



Bit-Tech puts it thusly:

HDR is the latest feature in the quest for greater rendering fidelity: Crytek have already added it to Far Cry as part of their 1.3 Patch and it is integral to Epic's Unreal Engine 3.0. Valve recently revealed that they are working on a special HDR showcase for Half Life 2 titled Lost Coast. Whilst Far Cry only implemented HDR via Shader Model 3.0, hence only working on Nvidia's latest-generation cards, Lost Coast will implement it via Shader Model 2.0, allowing for it to work on ATI's current generation.

The middle image has normal exposure with HDR rendering. The left image is underexposed, resulting in a dark image: foreground detail is heavily muted, and the window to our right is completely invisible. In contrast (literally), the right image is overexposed: note the abundant blooming, whiting out areas of the building in the distance; foreground textures are easily visible.

Look at the difference in actual screenshots here:



I mean look at how a scene could look:



That's a scene from monestry.

And an old man down by the dock:

Naturally, all this eye candy comes at a price, but Valve are still figuring out where exactly the recommended specification lies for Lost Coast. When pushed, Lombardi revealed that while the CPU requirements may be relatively low at 2.0 to 3.0Ghz, the hunger for RAM borders on the guttenous at 1Gb to 2Gb, though he stresses that these figures are still to be finalised.

Naturally, the more the better, but considering most gamers have 512MB of RAM, and even enthusiasts somehow make do with "only" 1GB, the suggestion that Lost Coast could need as much as two gigabytes of RAM to run HDR optimally may mean that most of the gaming public won't see the full performance for a while yet.

The graphics card requirements are slightly less than stratospheric, at 6800GT / X800Pro level, though as Lombardi points out, "Higher will be better, as always." Just how much better is unknown at this point: "We have not yet had a chance to complete our testing on the highest end products coming from the leading vendors," Lombardi told us, "But we hope to have those details and a final release date to share soon."

Well that's good news for those of us who have very high spec machines, but not so good for those with lower-spec

This will be a free download via steam. I'm excited to say the least!!

Full article @ Bit_tech

 

[FarFarAway]

And I just realised - over 3000 posts

 

[FragTek]

Looks pretty impressive... Hope to see it playing on my puter soon

Gratz on the +3000 posts

 

[NickS]

yeah!

I can't wait for teh HDR for HL2. It'd be wicked sweet if they got it for CS: S too.

 

[bloodthirst]

yeah!

I can't wait for teh HDR for HL2. It'd be wicked sweet if they got it for CS: S too.

fk yeah bro its going to be awesome lol im just finishing off hl2 for the second time since i got it and i love it

 

[balilu]

hey kempez you said it exits on far cry. how can i enable it? id like to check it out

 

[NickS]

Ohh HDR for FarCry is frickin PURE OWNAGE. I have it enabled, it's amazing.

 

[balilu]

how do i enable it ?

 

[FarFarAway]

how do i enable it ?

There ya go chap:

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njc4

 

[Dav0s]

yeah bringing it to CS:S would be awesome

 

[limqareb]

i cant wait till i get these games, dont have any yet, does anyone have doom3 here?

 

[balilu]

10x kempez altough i found it befor you posted