I am an advocate of HDR lighting. In the right enviroment the effect can be amazing. I havent yet seen HDR in a space enviroment, but I have the feeling that it would greatly complement it. In space you would imagine that there would be a huge contrast between the pitch black of the void and the brillant light of the sun, or beams and engines for that matter. HDR lighting helps make this contrast visible and leads to very realistic lighting. Using HDR if you were actually to a sun it would appear very bright, and would make other objects hard to discern
Using HDR intense light will bleed into objects. For example, while watching a ship against the backdrop of a sun the light from the sun would bleed into the ship. HDR can make realistic sunsets, elipses, and other phenomena found in space.
As well, HDR can be very cool for backgrounds, making light from those backgrounds more or less intense depending on who or what is between you and the background.
I have seen HDR lighting in two games so far. Half Life 2, and in Farcry 1.3
In Half Life 2, I beleive that HDR is only enabled on Radeon 9xxx, Radeon x series, and Geforce 6 series (I beleive that Geforce FX is capable of doing the HDR, but it is disabled for performance reasons.) In Half Life 2 the HDR is a nice touch, but not very noticable, and it doesent effect perfmance all two much.
In Farcry though, HDR is a completley different beast. It is used everywhere, and effects everything. It is lightyears ahead of the HDR used in Half Life 2. It makes a huge difference to the graphics of the game, and is probably the most impressive graphical feature in Farcry. The downside is that it eats up performance like a pig in an already demanding engine. There is a bug which screws up the game if anti-ailising is also used. As well, Farcry's HDR ONLY works with Geforce 6 class hardware.
The HDR rendering technique used in farcry is called
openEXR HDR. This is the technique used by lucasfilms and industrial light and magic, and is supported by newer nvidia hardware, not sure about ATI though. Make no mistake, this is very, very impressive stuff...
...and you can download the source too! Everything you need to know about implementing openEXR into an application is available on the website
I would very much like to see HDR rendering in vegastrike. Having a 6800 Ultra I would of course like to see openEXR HDR supports, but I would be very happy of another form as well. The best of both worlds would be to have support for regular and openEXR (for those of us lucky enough to support it) high dynamic range rendering.