ArmA 2 HDR Settings - Whats the difference?

Since 1.08 or 1.55 (I installed both) you can change the HDR Setting from "Normal" to "High" and "Very Hight"

But whats the difference? I cant make out one :confused:

"Very high" gives you lower fps than the other ones, that's the only difference for me atleast..

:P

3 different options

8-bit

16-bit

32-bit

The Option has been there since arma (just not in the front end). The difference between dark and light should be bigger with higher settings, some users report less issues with over saturation with 16 or 32, personally i see no difference, I suppose it depends on your GPU.

8-bit (normal) was default before this option.

Increase when annoyed with bad banding, that can show up in certain conditions.

Normal gives me extremely bad banding effects in certain conditions.

Very high eliminates these completely.

In case linking doesn't work, example image.

I deliberately modified curves so the effect wouldn't get lost in jpg conversion, for this particular image, but the effect can be this bad ingame in certain situations, especially during low light and bad weather.

Yeah I remember seeing this a lot in ArmA 2 when I had to run PP on low and cringing at the banding, especially during very early sunrise. Only ugly thing that I saw during my favorite time in the game lol, other than the light cones but they've been gone since Arrowhead.

Thanks CarlGustaffa for the good explaination. :)

I've never noticed this before, although I always have PP on normal. The FPS decrease is shocking though. :P

Sights like EOTech on Mk16 looks really bad for me on HDR=High. Anyone else have this? Currently I have to choose in low light situations; crappy banding skies and usable sights, or awesome skies and unusable sights. Due the performance hit on High, I easily go with the first options enabling me to use my weapon. But the excessive banding makes the game look pretty awful in these conditions.

Yeah EOTech + High HDR looks horrible for me as well. I'll tell you what looks really bad though; the PEQ-2 laser. It becomes this massive death star beam. There's also an odd effect whereby it looks as if you have lost depth perception when you point the beam at something. It looks like the laser only extends a few feet in front of you.

It does make some things look a little better though:

-The banding, as previously noted

-Blooming light sources such as airfield lights and the IR strobe appear softer and more realistic.

-The bloom under a street light, although significantly brighter and whiter than on Normal HDR, becomes less blinding and also looks more like NVG bloom than the green fog as it appeared before.

HDR Enables Bloom, so Normal Has less bloom on objects

[Mainly during 12 noon ArmA 2 Time]

And also Sky Bloom

for AMD.ATI users with new HD6xxx and/or new drivers i suggest to disable subsurface optimizations and set Catalyst AI to Very High Quality

Which surface optimizations?

Can HDR be disabled?

No, you can't disable HDR. But you can disable the automatic adjustment of aperture using setAperture, but unless you are trying to implement your own kind of control system (without access to sceneBrightness) I won't recommend it. I tried but ran into more problems than I appreciated.

I've got the setting on high for now, but I can imagine the FPS drop would be quite large

Is there a need of AA when HDR is in use? High AA with high HDR killed my 5770 with 80% 3D Rez and 1920x1080

Two different features, and HDR is always in use. I wouldn't bother with high HDR if you can't take it, keep in mind all it does is remove banding in bad lighting conditions and make certain sights pretty much unusable in the process. Turn on high HDR if you want to take nice screenshots. :p I wish there was another way, cheaper way, to remove the bad banding effects.

AA pretty much only smooths lines and avoid stepping effects, something that at 1920x1080 shouldn't be that much of a problem. I have never been able to use AA in any BIS game (sub par on equipment). Not sure if normal AA gives access to sub pixel information like FSAA does (>100% 3D res).

Can HDR be disabled?

You can change the value that controls the setting to zero in your config file. Seems like it should do something.

Two different features, and HDR is always in use. I wouldn't bother with high HDR if you can't take it, keep in mind all it does is remove banding in bad lighting conditions and make certain sights pretty much unusable in the process. Turn on high HDR if you want to take nice screenshots. :p I wish there was another way, cheaper way, to remove the bad banding effects.

Yes, I agree. It's weird to play this game in 32bit color yet the sky uses it's own colorspacing. The terrible banding at night always annoyed me, yet it never crossed my mind it had to do with the HDR settings (although it sure looked like 8bit to me). Now i have it on high for 16bit, which is a lot better but i hope BIS wil be able to change this whole concept without framehits (on very high the game got really choppy). In this day and age there's no excuse for not having a 32bit sky (Remembering playing quake 3 over 10 years ago with 32bit sky's that looked pretty cool and didn't cost framerate).

Its not very noticeable when actually playing the game I turned it to normal and got a 10fps boost.

the only thing that suffers are particle effects really and its not very noticable too me because im usually never blowing shit up just messing around in the editor with infantry firefights.

Is there a need of AA when HDR is in use? High AA with high HDR killed my 5770 with 80% 3D Rez and 1920x1080

heres good settings for you

Res amd 3D res 1920x1080 so 100%

AA on Low or normal

HDR on HIGH

Post Processing on Normal SSAO is an FPS killer from what I tested and my friend reported the same he has a 5770 aswell

on a map like takistan object detail on High or normal and viewdistance around 4 or 5k

object detail doesnt actually mean better looking objects it pretty much means object draw distance if there is more detail its very subtle.

Hope this helps

:cheers:

I want an option to disable it, also Normal is too much for my PC I think :s

EDIT: Ok, im going to try changing settings manually to 0

@Hellhound:

32 bit color = 8 bit per channel (+ additional 8 bit for an alpha channel). It's enough for what you see on the screen. However, it may not be sufficient for calculations of colors (Photoshop I believe uses 16 bits), especially if you need to calculate in HDR. I suspect the banding occurs because with HDR, the difference between each value is much greater. So instead of 0 being black and 255 being white (on all channels), 255 is now many times brighter than white to reflect the brightness of the sky and sun.

Can it be fixed/enhanced? I'm not sure, I guess it depends on the engine and/or what kind of encoding is used. If 32 bit HDR actually means 32 bits per channel in OA, that is to put it mildly, a lot! If implementation allows it, I'd like to propose 12 bit depth as an intermediate step between 8 and 16 bit (low should be 8 bit, and default/normal should be 12 bit). That allows 4096 levels, which is still 16 times better than what 8 bit gives us. So between 1 band of colors, you'd now get 16 different gradations, which should be sufficient to eliminate most of the banding effect. It does require operations with (3) nibbles/hexits per channel, not sure how effective a computer is working with those, so it may not even give an advantage over 16 bit at all for all I know.

All I know is that 8 bit looks utterly horrible in some conditions (at least in it's current implementation), and 16 bit has too much of a cost to it. If I assume that range is constant among 8, 16, and 32 bit, and that only accuracy differs, 32 bit sounds way excessive. If my math is correct, which is doubtful given how tired I am atm :D

I don't know, just airing some thoughts here, I'm not really a programmer.

Interesting topic. :)

So before this new HDR option appeared, was the quality at the 8 bit standard?