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Comment by HellDunkel | Hacker News Reader

The author makes a point of Nintendo opting out of HDR but does not realize thats due to hardware limits not allowing deferred shading. The HDR techniques he does not like are all made possible by the use of deferred shading. These techniques may be sometimes used to overky stylize the look but it is undisputed they create more realistic images.

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Promit Roy has been being knowledgeable about graphics since before I was in college. I kind of doubt he "doesn't realize" it. The dude is really, really good.

And HDR doesn't really do anything to materially aid what he's calling out as well done in the first place. It's ancillary. It's not important. What's important is actual artistic intent and structure. That's what's lacking, along with a misunderstanding of why certain techniques work in film and don't when they are uncritically applied to games.

I dont know what kind of HDR you refer to. My point was that for realistc rendering or physically based, whatever you might call it, a linear workflow (light calc in linearized space) is crucial. It is very important for the artist too if you aim at realism. Of course it brings challenged such as exposure correction and managing dyamics. These challenges are not yet fully solved but to say we ought to abandon HDR and go back to SRGB is at least questionable... we might as well go back to mode 13.

The Switch is perfectly capable of both deferred shading and HDR, which are themselves independent unrelated techniques. You can make an argument about whether or not those are the best implementation trade-offs for that hardware, taking performance and desired visuals into account. But there's nothing inherently preventing you from doing it on the Switch and it's a fairly capable GPU in its own right.

P.S. Unreal Engine reintroduced forward (non-deferred) rendering as an option last year because it's more efficient in VR.

True, but deferred shading takes up extra performance, in most cases, thats why it is less used on lower end systems or vr where you need 120fps. i did not claim hdr or deferred was impossible on nintendo switch.

Deferred rendering is on the way out, in my opinion. With the advent of clustered forward rendering, we can get many, many lights without having to do multiple passes, cram everything in the gbuffer, use a single shading model for the whole scene, and be limited to screen-space anti-aliasing like FXAA and TSAA.

Please note there is s difference between deferred rendering and deferred shading. The latter is here to stay and all major game engines have made it their main technique. (vr excluded)

This is false, HDR and deferred shading are two completely unrelated concepts.

A few months ago I hacked tonemapping straight into the ubershader of some foss Quake client, you don’t even need a seperate buffer to do these things.

They are not as separate. A deferred shading pipeline would make little sense if it was operating purely in LDR. Tonemapping in foward shading can be done but makes a lot more sense to do as a post step. If you ask a photographer about tone mapping he/she would tell you about a very different concept (but is more likely to turn away in disgust)... and that could not be done by color-mapping 1 fragment at a time.

What kind of esoteric hardware can't do deferred shading? I really doubt that the switch lacks the ability, and I know it doesn't lack the processing power.

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