With HDR displays becoming more and more affordable and commons, from what I understand and read online, unity still uses ACES 1.0 which is seriously outdated especially when you see better alternative like ACES 2.0 or AgX.
For SDR thankfully someone made an AgX port which I highly recommend looking into : here
But for HDR you are sadly stuck with ACES 1.0 and all it’s cons, while for example blender 5.0 now support both ACES 2.0 and AgX for HDR displays, and other game engine like godot comes with AgX prepacked.
Anyway my main complain in this post is that we lack choices in the tone mappers category and the ACES implementation could use a new coat of paint, especially considering HDR displays.
(EDIT): I made this simple scene in HDRP to showcase the difference between the already available tonemappers + the AgX implementation mentioned above. We can clearly see with the current ACES implementation how certain color (especially blue) are clipping thus losing information.
AgX on the other hand retain this information and the AgX washed out look can be fixed by adjusting the color curves.
+1 from me. Also they should fix white balance. If I remember correctly it’s not a proper implementation of algorithm and it’s just adding blue tint on top.
Man I wish AGX was a thing natively implemented in Unity. I normally use URP and I’m tired of fighting ACES darkish/saturated look, to the point I have considered using Beautify 3 asset because it now also has AGX tonemapping. Only reason I have not done is because I hate adding assets as they tend to backfire on long time projects…
I really hope Unity considers adding it, but given that we are 5+ years into URP and we are still missing things like SSR (at this point I don’t even care about quality, I would take any solution because BiRP already had them 5+ years ago)
I do not have much faith, tbh, but hey, you never know
+1 from me as well. ACES 1.0 and Neutral as our only options feels bad when the field has moved beyond them. AGX, GT7, ACES 2.0, there are many, many tonemappers which have rendered what we have access to obsolete.
I wouldn’t mind that much if Unity allowed the community to interface with the Tonemapper in Post Processing, but the enum it exposes is internal. There is no way to add your own tonemapper and put it where it ‘goes’ even if you went through the painstaking process of implementing it from scratch yourself.
I have tried to do this using a custom render feature with a shader, but it doesn’t look right. Granted I am not that great at implementing whitepaper level shaders, but it definitely feels like we lack access to something.
