I found a page on Wikipedia syaing Crysis used this. I haven't played Crysis, but even the sample screen they showed in the article showed halos around the characters and even mountains in the distance being brightened by a tank turret which was close up and had a halo around it.
I also found this page which has a high res image of it in action on some cubes:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=463075
I think there may be a way to get rid of the halos, but it might be more expensive to render.
The last time I saw halos like this I was working on a sharpening algorithm, and they resulted from a step which required the scene to be gaussian blurred. That is unsharp masking. I fixed the issue by replacing the gaussian filter with a median filter which is median sharpening, and this looked much better. But the radiuses have to be small because a median filter also isn't perfect and will carve corners off things. I'm sure there's a way to filter things more like a median filter and without the corner carving, but I haven't discovered it yet and it's probably even more expensive than the median filter. But the median filter if done right isn't neccesarily much more expensive than the gaussian.
Anyway, I suspect that changing up how the z values are processed could get rid of the halos.
I also found this page which has a high res image of it in action on some cubes:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=463075
I think there may be a way to get rid of the halos, but it might be more expensive to render.
The last time I saw halos like this I was working on a sharpening algorithm, and they resulted from a step which required the scene to be gaussian blurred. That is unsharp masking. I fixed the issue by replacing the gaussian filter with a median filter which is median sharpening, and this looked much better. But the radiuses have to be small because a median filter also isn't perfect and will carve corners off things. I'm sure there's a way to filter things more like a median filter and without the corner carving, but I haven't discovered it yet and it's probably even more expensive than the median filter. But the median filter if done right isn't neccesarily much more expensive than the gaussian.
Anyway, I suspect that changing up how the z values are processed could get rid of the halos.