This brief analyzes the performance of the hardware-based tone mapping operators for compression of high dynamic range images. The bottlenecks of a tone mapping system are determined and a high-performance field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of an operator is introduced. The operator utilizes polynomial mapping technique, adaptive to the pixel values; hence preserving high contrast areas. The technique is further optimized for the presented resource-efficient FPGA implementation. We show that the timing optimization does not reduce the image quality, by obtaining high peak signal-to-noise ratio of the resulting images. The timing comparison to the similar implementations shows 2.5 times increase in the achieved throughput, irrespective of the hardware platform.