Valve's High Dynamic Range Explored

Final Words

Performance-wise, we've seen how the HDR effects have a significant impact on performance in Day of Defeat, and in some cases, the impact was surprising. On cards like the X800 and the 6600 GT, it's interesting to see how HDR requires the kind of resources that would effectively cut your framerate in half, especially given the general subtlety of the lighting effects.

We've also shown that ATI seems to handle Valve's implementation of HDR better than NVIDIA, and if we could have tested with one of the next-gen ATI cards, the 7800 GTX would have assuredly been beaten out for the highest fps. But most of the cards that we tested were able to handle the performance hit from the HDR settings. Unfortunately, if you have a less-powerful card than these that we've tested, you will probably have to either turn down your resolution or forego the HDR.

While the HDR effects in the game are subtle, we should mention that after a bit of play testing, we found that our eyes tended to adapt to the auto-exposure and bloom effects and everything seemed to blend together in a way which added a lot to the gameplay. In fact, when playing the game with the HDR settings turned off, the game looks surprisingly flat by comparison. We are impressed at how Valve was able to enhance the source engine in such a major way, while keeping everything subtle enough to sometimes forget that it's there. Much like the Matrix, it's hard to understand until you experience it for yourself.

If you played much Day of Defeat before the upgrade, the source version will no doubt make you very happy, just as Counterstrike: Source did when it first came out. However, by now, the Halflife 2 engine isn't quite as new and exciting as it was when CS Source came out, and in spite of the new HDR effects, the "wow" factor isn't quite as pronounced. Still, there is no denying that the new lighting effects add a kind of sparkle to the HL2 graphics, which, while still excellent, had seemed to have lost a bit of luster with time. These graphical enhancements are certainly a step forward, and it will be very interesting to see how these new effects will be used in games of the near future.

We will also be excited to see if Valve is able to stick to their guns and continue to enhance Source on the way to their next major project. This new method certainly seems to make more sense to us as Valve's engine customers will have access to a better quality engine and gamers will reap the benefits of new technology faster. We look forward to the surprises Valve has in store for us in the future.