DX9 for B.o.S??

[Liz Lemon]

Originally Posted by ZaltysZ

Photorealism implies that image is like photograph, which is very different from what human eyes see in reality. I.e. photorealistic image tends to suffer from typical low dynamic range, what makes bright parts too bright, or dark parts too dark. If you are going to represent a tree in bright summer day in photorealistic way, then it will have some leaves almost black, and some leaves almost white, while other leaves will be green. Black/white leaves are details being seen by eyes, but lost because of "photorealism". If you choose to drop photorealism, and make bright leaves less bright, and dark leaves less dark, you will represent more details, but image will become more flat, less impressive/convincing. In other words, if you fix one end, you will break the other, and it will be so until graphic cards and displays will be able to represent high enough dynamic range.

I personally prefer details over impression/feeling in combat sims, because the less I see, the less realistic decision I can make. However, lots of people prefer impression, and RoF kinda goes more for later.

Ahh yes, the photorealistic vs what the human eye can see argument.

In theory I agree with you. A game should seek to duplicate what the human eye can see as closely as possible. But the problem with this is that we have no displays that can duplicate what our eyes can see.

This is a problem that cinema had to deal with early on. And its still a problem today - be it plasma, lcd, and old CRT or even a 4k projector, you can never display the dynamic range, depth of color, resolution (iffy) or framerate, let alone all the other little things that would match the human eye.

Because of this, I think games should try to emulate films as closely as possibly. Not just because the above problems have been something that film has worked out over 100+ years, but also because our expectations of what reality on a 2d screen looks like are based on film. This is why having things like chromatic abrasion, bloom and film grain can go a long way to making a digital image look "real" on the screens we see them on. But as an aside the things I just listed are often over done to a significant degree in games... but that is a whole other discussion I can get into.