Opinion: current spotting mechanics heavily distort PVP gameplay and force an extremely low engagement altitude, which negates many aircraft-specific advantages and other important aspects of A2A combat

I'm basically repeating myself, but all the benefits of PBR diminish with distance. Spotting is a two-fold problem. Part of it is contrast, the other is distance. You can get great images of shiny planes at close range even in 2.1 of DCS, but at a distance you don't see the same effect because there's just not enough pixels for the effect to happen. I think scenes post PBR are more colorful as well, so that'll help differentiate planes from their backdrops a bit.

PBR should help with the contrast problems of DCS when a target is only some <500 meters away, but I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes at the crucial 1-5km distances where you should absolutely be able to maintain visual, but will struggle to in DCS for various reasons.

Can just happen when the image is displayed in a monitor or must be emulated at render level

As I said in my post, monitors aren't bright enough, nor are pixels small enough for the effect to be simulated at a physical level. It would imply that, in the case of the nav light for example, that you would have one very, very tiny pixel be significantly brighter than the surrounding pixels.

HDR TVs actually seem to be moving towards achieving a greater range of brightness values between pixels, but even if they could perfectly replicate the varying brightnesses, they still don't have the resolution necessary to achieve that effect naturally and without any kind of "cheating." And that's without getting into the difficulty of just rendering an image at that resolution. 4k native rendering is only just starting to become sort of reasonable with very high end hardware.

This actually dips into "well just buy a better monitor" argument that you so commonly see in defense of the pre 1.5.X days where DCS did absolutely nothing to try and make aircraft more visible at a distance. You had one guy in particular with a 4k 50" TV saying "works for me, stop complaining and buy better hardware." I don't see buying everybody extremely expensive hardware as the solution to this problem.

Again, this is a solved problem. You can look at various combat flight sims out there right now that have good solutions to this. They have different methodologies to achieve it, and it's not unreasonable to expect that ED could (if they wanted to) just look at those for inspiration and create a system that works just as well.

/r/hoggit Thread Parent