@devs technical question about gamma setting

[twistking]

hello,

please note, that this is not a complaint, but a question out of curiosity.

 

Dcs 2.5 saw the introduction of a gamma setting in the options. i always found the implementation to be rather odd.

Let me explain: many games feature similar settings to adapt brightness and contrast to the clients display, since for some reason the gpu driver does not use the LUT (set f.e. through windows colour management) when rendering a 3d scene. Thus making color/contrast adjustment a reasonable feature for any game.

However these adjustments are nearly always seperated from graphics options and feature only relatively adjustments on relative, proprietary scales (f.e. -10 to +10).

It is also very common on gaming consoles, where different TV-sets could potential differ dramatically in contrast ("adjust slider until symbol xyz is barely visible").

 

 

Dcs differs in that regard, as you are asked to choose an absolute gamma value (1.8, 2.0, 2.2 etc.) which would lead one to believe the correct setting would be the actual value your monitor is calibrated on (calibrated by yourself or factory calibrated does not matter here), which would be 2.2 (srgb) for most users.

However after some testing it is obvious, that the setting is not meant to reflect your actual monitor setup, but should/must be used to find a very subjective compromise to cope with the very high dynamic range of current dcs lighting tech.

 

 

This led me to believe, that the gamma setting was designed as an intermediate option, while lighting and especially dynamic range is still getting tweaked.

 

 

I am very curious what the driving factors behind this peculiar implementations have been and if they hint towards future integration of better/dynamic HDR-compression and/or support for HDR-displays.

[twistking]

another oddity is, that the graphic options default gamma value is 2.2, which look correct, as SRGB defaults to 2.2 as well, however the 2.2 gamma in dcs seems to be an objectively wrong setting for any display type, which is only remotely accurate in brightness response.

the sweetspot for most users seems to be at around 1.8 and i think this is the setting all the promotional pics and videos are recorded with.

why is this the case? it does not make any sense to me...

 

*edit* also this topic got moved, which ss totally fine, however i want to stress, that i am on stable branch and therefore referring to 2.5 stable and its implementation of gamma (idk if things changed in 2.5.1).

Edited May 25, 2018 by twistking