I disagree. You don’t need to have HDR textures. The engine allows lights to extend beyond the range of a typical 8-bit monitor, and the textures scale accordingly. If you’re happy with the 8-bit range of a typical 16-million-color texture, then you shouldn’t have a problem with the final results using a standard texture. More often than not I find myself scaling down the contrast of diffuse textures because looks too harsh in the final result. Again, HDR lighting scales the contrast in textures automatically. Games have done this for decades. Ico had HDR on the PS2 way back in 2001. Twilight Princess released in 2006 with the effect in full force on the Gamecube. Monitors just haven’t kept up with their ability to display more than 256 values. We got surround sound, HD, 120 hz, 240 hz, 3D, 4K, and OLED all before we got HDR. Now that we have it, I want to use it. I want to know what my lights actually look like.
Expanded color gamut has nothing, necessarily, to do with expanded luminance gamut. Normalized to standard realworld PBR materials current luminance texture range is enough, the color gamut however for textures is very much out of range.