Re:Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping
by zokier on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @02:49AM
(#15539717)
> And you could have another dimmer that goes between exactly the same two levels of lightness. The same range. but with 1,000,000 steps in between. The range of the two dimmer switches is the same. They both go from the same minimum to the same maximum.
The thing is that you can't set the minimum value arbitrarily, because the scale is anchored to zero. So "1" is always one step above zero, and the step size is a function of bit depth.
So going with our example here, a dimmer with 1000000 steps would not have the same range as dimmer with 8 steps, because the the minimum brightness of one is 1/1000000th of max, and 1/8th of the max for the other (assuming linear scale for simplicity's sake, the principle applies to nonlinear scales too)
The thing is that you can't set the minimum value arbitrarily, because the scale is anchored to zero. So "1" is always one step above zero, and the step size is a function of bit depth.
So going with our example here, a dimmer with 1000000 steps would not have the same range as dimmer with 8 steps, because the the minimum brightness of one is 1/1000000th of max, and 1/8th of the max for the other (assuming linear scale for simplicity's sake, the principle applies to nonlinear scales too)