Any Interest in High Color Depths

Hey there,

Questions from one of my Intel colleagues.
[ol]
[li]Is the game industry interested in High Color Depths?
[/li][li]Is Rec.2020 high enough?
[/li][/ol]

Thank you

Linear color workflows are a constant pain for us – the reality is often very obscure, and different parts of the pipeline don’t always agree on the verbiage or the ‘right’ thing to do. And, of course, it’s hard to teach artists to view an image in HDR consistently. We haven’t really digested 32-bit per channel workflows yet, so higher than that is probably not a high priority for us – but anything to cut down on the confusion and make thing standard all the way through would be great

Better isn’t always better. Higher color depths and fidelity in general could be a good thing, or it could just reveal more “digital acne”. Have you ever tried to get smooth gradients in DXT images containing subtle gradation? It always produces banding. Having a framebuffer / output system that shows you exactly how horrible this looks might not work in our favor.

So… I think we have interest, but it isn’t something that a lot of people are clamoring for yet, and there will be negative repercussions. HDTV makes the picture look better, but it sacrificed smooth motion to get there and everyone on camera had to apply extra pancake…

we have adopted a linear lighting material/renderer for our current project and it is causing a lot of headaches, particularly with alpha channels. the artists have no good method for authoring alpha channels in photoshop, everything comes out brighter than expected and photoshop’s color management options don’t apply to layer masks, or layer transparency.

Thanks for the input, I’ve passed your comments along.