Graphics are Great WTF are people saying rf 1 ?

Well, cameras also have non-linear characteristics which is some sort of tone mapping.

I once posted a comparison between linear color space and non-linear tone mapping:



As you say, introducing non-linear tone mapping decreases contrast and decreases saturation of image, but it also preserves proper tone of image in bright areas. Look at that green strip on the sky when using linear color space.
It's caused by green and blue color components to be allready at maximum possible to display values (255) while red component still needs to catch up.

Just like you can get oversteer with sound, you can get overbright with image, but the problem with image is that it has 3 independent components. When one of them is oversteered and others are not, then one of them is not properly represented while other two are. This means that actual visible color will be different than it should be.

Tone mapping tends to bend the color curve near maximum values and therefore reduces this effect.

For the same reason sky on photo you pasted is completely white. In reality you would be able to see it's blue tone no matter the brightness.
Contrast in reality can be huge sometimes and there are only 3 ways of representing this on computer monitor:
- darken entire image so that colors can fit into limited display range (we wouldn't like to drive on dark circuits wouldn't we?)
- leave the image oversteered and with erroneus colors near overbrights
- apply some kind of non-linear function that will squeeze that contrast into display range, sacrificing some contrast and saturation

Well, optimally game should allow all three
If your display monitor can handle high contrast, then you may let the game render darker images and just brighten up your monitor. You sacrifice some color precision, but it may still work out well.
With other display monitors some people would prefer 2nd or 3rd option.

Personally I'd go for tone mapping. Contrast and brightness can be subjective and you can get used to them while some artifacts like green strip on the sky will always look bad.

An interesting option would be to perform tone mapping and then use gamma correction and postprocessing to increase contrast and saturation.

 

edit: pics removed

 

Looks very nice.

I think final will be closer to that.

They like fix up the foggy HDR for sure.

 

Yep looks better, but at the very end of my previous post I said you could apply gamma correction to tone mapped image and you did just that
No tone mapping at all would end up badly.

So I did gamma correction aswell and here's my comparison again:




This time I took the tone mapped image and applied gamma correction to it.
As you can see - contrast is more less the same as in original image, but there are no strange artifact related to color oversteer.

I know the image itself is not anything amazing, but it wasn't the point. The point was to show what kind of problems you may deal with when you don't use tone mapping and that it's possible to restore constrast and saturation after tone mapping - just like you did with that car screenshot

rFactor 2 does perform some of that stuff but it's still in development (and has exposure control bug since build 60), so we have to wait and see.

So the conclussion is not that tone mapping decreases contrast and needs to go Conclusion is that tone mapping helps reducing overbright artifacts and needs to stay, but with a little help of gamma correction.

 

I never tried these shaders in rF1 were they openly available to the public? I thought they were only made public to mod teams? Either way yes i agree the difference between the two is rather large. 2nd looks quite SHIFT and GT5 like. Is this not something ISI can do themselves though, i mean they have said alot that it's all unfinished in regards to visuals?

I agree btw about the tracks, i think rF2's tracks are better than pCARS apart from the lighting

 

It just looks correct.
'shift' is a sinonim of 'arcade' but we shouldn't be afraid to say that gfx is done in those titles just more realistic