"This includes - but is not limited to - the holy grail of perceived iris adjustments that the human eye would make in a realtime environment."
Your eyes already do that when you look at the monitor. That's not a holy grail.
Your eyes already do that when you look at the monitor. That's not a holy grail.
Dynamic HDR is underappreciated and misused...
Today's common displays are incapable of giving much intensity at all with their brightest white, so intense colours have to be created via other means. Dynamic HDR is the way to do that!
Most games use it terribly, just as a pointless feature to sound cool, but if you want to see it done right, take a look at the reactor core scene in HL2 Episode 1. Without dynamic HDR, it looks like a regular old boring scene with lots of white and a floating blue ball.
With HDR turned on full, the intensity of that floating blue ball is really highlighted by how it contrasts with the environment.
That effect was previously impossible because simulating its intensity would require either the ball or the environment to be coloured to some strange extremity, which degrades the rest of the experience. (One of the two objects then looks terrible, and everything looks really weird unless looked at from the right angle).
With dynamic HDR, that same scene is possible because the ball's contrast with the environment is simulated in real time, thus neither the ball nor the wall are by default ugly and washed out. The effect happens when it needs to, creating the same experience that could theoretically be done statically, except preserving the quality of the scene as it changes.