Bloom/HDR on old GPUs \ VOGONS

Bloom/HDR on old GPUs

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First post, by silikone

Posted on 2018-07-06, 21:37

silikone Offline

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As I was chronologically going through the old GPU demos, I was intrigued by seeing how early novel effects had been put into practice on real-time consumer rendering hardware. I was in particular reminded of the bloom boom that took place in the mid-2000's. I was wondering how many examples there are of games implementing bloom/HDR functioning on a wide range of hardware at the time, meaning anything prior to the long-lived shader model 3 generation (thanks to shader model 4's Vista exclusivity). Half-Life 2: Lost Coast comes into mind.

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Reply 1 of 1, by leileilol

Posted on 2018-07-07, 01:01

leileilol Offline

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The earliest bloom game I can think of is some around the PS2 launch (The Bouncer, etc). The thing about bloom is that it's a buffer-based effect and reading video memory is always expensive on the PC whereas it's easy on 6th gen consoles with thier unified memory architectures etc.

Earliest bloom in a released PC game I can think of is Bridge Commander (2002) and I forget if that's shader bloom or just the render-to-texture technique.

The texture bloom techniques are particularly bad for tile-based rendering (i.e. PowerVR KYRO) so performance will just die on those as it gets a bit recursive. Dreamcast/Naomi games that used buffer effects only dealt with the previous rendered frame

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