For those who just wanna know: cards at the time performed math on brightness values assuming a linear brightness scale when it should be logarithmic.
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“It’s a bit technical,” begins Birdwell, "but the simple version is that graphics cards at the time always stored RGB textures and even displayed everything as non linear intensities, meaning that an 8 bit RGB value of 128 encodes a pixel that’s about 22% as bright as a value of 255, but the graphics hardware was doing lighting calculations as though everything was linear.
Jesus Christ, I knew this was a problem with image editing software back then, but I never knew, that GPU manufacturers fucked it up as well. How did this happen?
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I have a good guess on how this would actually happen:
PM: We need this
Specialist: makes this (doesn’t check results)
QC: Looks good (but doesn’t actually check)
Some updates later may further break the functionality. And as long as numbers aren’t blatantly wrong (think 0s everywhere, for example) and nobody checks thoroughly enough, the issue will remain.
I have unfortunate experience of being a part of such a story, haha. There are ways to counter it. Mainly, their project documentation either wasn’t up to par or wasn’t used as a reference during creation and tests. Either way, it’s negligence.
I imagine in case of GPU design, there should be a bunch of tests for image correctness at some point, which would require pixel perfect reproduction to pass.
But it’s plausible that tests were running incorrect math too.
Linear is probably a lot faster?
“They are just human after aaaall 🎶”
Laziness
When the HL2 documentary came out, someone said “all these gaming news sites will have contant for months” and they were absolutely right
I do this to my silicon vendor. I apparently made some people’s lives very uncomfortable for a good while this past year after I decompiled some of their binary blobs.
Everyone’s saying RGB is the problem, but what’s the alternative? CMYK?
Allow me to introduce you to the perceptually uniform color spaces, CIELAB, CIELUV and HSLuv, something I needed for a project I was working on a few years ago:
https://programmingdesignsystems.com/color/perceptually-uniform-color-spaces/
That moment when there’s one company with which you’d almost be OK if they turned into a monopoly (still no, though).
Valve is that perfect example of being just shitty enough to be annoying without stepping over the line into complete enshittification. But this too will happen. I reckon there’d be good odds of it happening not long after Gabe retires.
If they ever go public then yes, enshittification is guaranteed. As long as they remain a privately held company, there’s a chance they can hold the enshittification at bay.
That’s my main worry, and why I’d never want a monopoly of any sort with contemporary hierarchical structures.
That explains why Doom 3’s shading looked so bad
Wasn’t their shading the whole selling point?
Mhm yes, is this going to fuck up older games?
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… It’s the headline on PC Gamer.
Also what does “stealing from Reddit”, an aggregator of Link’s, even mean?
Couldn’t have even changed the obnoxious thread title from when you stole this from reddit?
I just crossposted it from Lemmy and didn’t bother changing the title. I’m not the one who took it from Reddit so calm down.
Okay, I just looked and it was @[email protected] who originally posted it to Lemmy so they’re probably the one who “stole” the title from Reddit. Be mad at them.
