"Pixelated" Lighting Gradients

CMDR Solveig

CMDR Solveig
I am wondering if anyone has this same problem.

Anytime there is a gradient light source over a dark background I can very clearly see defined lines of different shades in the lighting. It looks as though the lighting is being rasterized. I've noticed this for a couple years in many different games and it doesn't actually bother me very much, but it's very common in a game like Elite. Does anyone know if this is an issue with my pc hardware that I never really thought much about?

Screenshot_0098 Forum.jpg
 

DoneWithFD

DoneWithFD
Looks pretty normal to me, save for the jpeg compression. It's not even banding all that much.
When you fade midtones to black over distance you will get banding in gradients (can be alleviated by dithering).

Is your desktop set to full colour? Running fewer bits per channel will make banding a lot worse.
 

Mephane

Mephane
CMDR Solveig said:
I am wondering if anyone has this same problem.

Anytime there is a gradient light source over a dark background I can very clearly see defined lines of different shades in the lighting. It looks as though the lighting is being rasterized. I've noticed this for a couple years in many different games and it doesn't actually bother me very much, but it's very common in a game like Elite. Does anyone know if this is an issue with my pc hardware that I never really thought much about?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I noticed this way back and ticketed it, but afaik nothing came out of it. I have no idea whether this is causes by the engine or even the video card itself.
 

Janichsan

J
This is something that can barely be avoided with current graphic standards. You rarely have displays that can show more than 16 million colours (24 bit colour depth) and that is not enough to get truly smooth gradients.
 

DangerMouse81

DangerMouse81
Yeah I get it too... I think it due to how high you set your gamma settings - On my monitor I have a "gaming mode" setting which increases the brightness/gamma and the "Pixelated" Lighting effect is very visible on the title screen!

I've enhanced this image so hopefully you can see the huge gradient differences...

title.jpg
 
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DoneWithFD

DoneWithFD
DangerMouse81 said:
Yeah I get it too... I think it due to how high you set your gamma settings - On my monitor I have a "gaming mode" setting which increases the brightness/gamma and the "Pixelated" Lighting effect is very visible on the title screen!

I've enhanced this image so hopefully you can see the huge gradient differences...

View attachment 13946
Click to expand...

The menu screen background is a looping video with macro-blocking artifacts from the video compression. When you mangle it further with bad gamma you're bound to end up with a horrible image. Nothing strange about it.
 
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CMDR Solveig

CMDR Solveig
Thanks for all the replies everyone. =)

That limitation is pretty much what I was thinking, and the main reason it doesn't quite bother me. I was definitely curious and wanted to ask after all this time though.
 
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