HDR has been tormented by side effects such as performance hits and that you were unable to use antialiasing with HDR activated. Valve has been working for a couple of years now with bringing HDR to the Source-engine and decided to make no compromises with this promising technology. The result shows it, with more developed effects, a small performance loss and support for antialiasing. “By the fourth interation, the lads had cracked it: MSAA worked; it worked on all DX9 hardware, with reasonable performance on even a Radeon 9600; indeed the performance was the best of the four methods, with only a small performance hit over Half-Life 2’s LDR solution.” All this and more will be available with Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and coming games based on the Source-engine, among others Day of Defeat: Source which will be released at the end of the month. At Bit-Tech they written an interesting article about Valve’s work with HDR and how it is used in Lost Coast.Those who haven’t heard of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast we should perhaps explain that it is a completely new map for the popular Half-Life 2 by Valve. This isn’t just any map but a place for Valve to reveal its new graphic technologies it has integrated into its engine Source. It is simply a demo that shows the level of details possible with the new verison of the Source-engine. The technology before any other is HDR (High Dynamic Range) has been used with several other games where FarCry is the probably best known example.
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