(Review) - We’ve all played Half-Life and it’s sequel Half-Life 2. The difference between the two games, in terms of graphics, is tremendous, and now Valve has gone ahead and updated the gaming engine to give you a level of detail and realism that you thought wouldn’t be possible until perhaps the next round of game releases.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a lighting process that’s been designed to emulate in-game or artificially generated lighting to closely mirror the changes we see in the real world.

In simpler terms, HDR allows you to make the objects brighter by allowing them to use the full brightness capabilities of the monitor and not just the brightness level at which they have been shot with (or rendered with) in the scene.

HDR is, by definition, the ratio of the largest to lowest measurable value of a signal. As of today, the 16-bit formats use color component values from 0 (for black) to 1 (for white), but you can’t define colors with increased vibrancy and shine by inputting value 2 for white to make it whiter than its traditional shade. This can limit lighting effects such as the glint on the metal blade of POP Warrior Within.

Using HDR, you can specify values that are far outside the redundant 0-1 ranges we are used to currently. To give you an everyday example, when you drive on a sunny day, it often happens that the minute you come out of the tunnel, the sunlight seems blazingly brilliant as your eyes take sometime to adjust to the difference in the light intensities. In a game like NFS, replicating this realistic phenomenon is difficult and nearly impossible for the lack of the ability to specify whiteness beyond level 1, but with HDR, you can accomplish just that, which is why it’s important to gamers that demand realism from their games.

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