Finally, the advanced HDR-ready engine technology was another great fit because it largely used PBR throughout, allowing easy integration of true HDR support. These realistic luminance levels allow for strong highlights that will take advantage of HDR displays. In other words, the engine isn’t cheating with the luminance values of light sources and isn’t faking SDR brightness effects. Specifically, we were looking for plausible, real-world levels of illumination and realistic relative luminance magnitudes. Also, an analysis of many captures of the game showed that the pre-tone mapping data had truly amazing scope for HDR. Screenshot 1 – A cinematic scene with great HDR potentialĪmongst other things, the great cinematic quality of this fantastic game is what got us at NVIDIA interested. Working in close collaboration, NVIDIA, Crystal Dynamics and Nixxes implemented true HDR displays in ‘Rise of the Tomb Raider’ as a way to push the graphic detail to unprecedented heights.įeaturing epic, high-octane action moments set in the most beautiful, hostile environments on earth, Rise of the Tomb Raider delivers a cinematic, survival action adventure where you will join Lara Croft on her first tomb raiding expedition as she seeks to discover the secret of immortality.

NVIDIA’s new Pascal GPUs offer unprecedented capability to support physically based rendering approaches. One key element that greatly increases the realism of HDR is physically-based content and lighting models (PBR). As a great introduction to this topic, please make sure to check out Evan Hart’s blog ‘Preparing for Real HDR’. In fact NVIDIA’s driver allows for displaying linear space, floating point frame buffers and thus tone mapping functions need to evolve to cater for this. HDR capable displays now put higher demands on tone mapping functions, as the desired output is no longer just SDR. Tone mapping has been applied to get down to standard dynamic range (SDR) displays for many years. Many games are already rendering to a higher dynamic range internally. Let’s concentrate on HDR for this blog post. The two dimensions of improvement in these new displays are often thought of as wider gamut and higher dynamic range (HDR).

While UHD as a specification was originally developed for televisions, the technologies involved will start to impact many classes of displays soon. With the advent of Ultra High Definition (UHD) television, displays are taking a substantial step forward compared to the standards developers have been used to for the past two decades.

This blog explores how we added support for true HDR to a real-time 3D application, focusing on the challenges tied to game development. Authors: Jeroen Soethoudt (Nixxes), Jurjen Katsman (Nixxes) and Holger Gruen(NVIDIA)

Hd rise of the tomb raider