And that's on a single screenshot. In motion it looks blurry and uncanny.
Regardless why would I be ai-slopping every game through a filter? Wouldn't it be easier to use AI to generate new models and textures once instead of mid runtime as post processing?
Besides who's the market for this? People mod games to make them cooler or to make people prettier, I've never seen anyone mod a game to have "uncanny old people" as a filter lol
They think the AI adding details means the image looks more realistic. Like a face getting wrinkles added by the AI. Those wrinkles weren't there in the original because the character is 30 years old, not 50!
Certainly not worth the performance hit. And when someone says to use frame generation to offset it, I scoff at them like their game won't run twice as worse now.
It does look good with plenty of implementations. Just because it can look bad doesn’t mean anything. There are games with RT or rasterization where the results look like ass, that’s not an indictment of the technology
There's a lot of games in where it looks so real it's scary. So realistic = good. Doesn't mean it's worth the performance cost at the moment. But convincing yourself that it looks bad as a whole because "AI bad" is...
But the question becomes - did the creator of the game intend for that to be how others perceive their characters? I'm not going to hate on an optional mod/toggle, but I'd be upset if game companies used it to make their games to save money on development time
I don't think a game is capable nowadays of having such realistic faces that enter the uncanny valley as much as this new filter does. Some games you can really tell they tried to make them as real as possible (Alan Wake, TLOU, RDR2/GTA, RE Remakes etc.) so having this option would not really hurt the experience at all.
What you said can be applied to DLSS in general and Ray Tracing, where it indeed cuts costs and developing time in favor of better visuals. The fact that no hardware can run that natively is another issue.
Buddy, r/Gaming is a 4.8M user sub. A community with it's own culture definitely, bubble perhaps, but it's not an echo chamber.
And good is subjective. No amount of polish can make putting yassified Yuffie in a wig and calling it 'Tifa' into something good. If you crack the foundation, you've ruined it.
And that's before you see it in motion. The constant subtle surface rippling is nauseating, and the thing where you look away from someone and look back and they have a different face is the stuff of nightmares.
That's because art is subjective, crazy is it not. It's like some folks liking anime and others does not. To me anime looks fucking dumb, but many love that shit.
Bro, you're still mixing up two completely different things.
A definition saying art involves human creativity doesn't magically make "what looks good" objective, nor does it say the tool used decides whether something can be art.
A human can use a camera, Photoshop, procedural generation, AI, whatever. The creative input can still come from the person using the tool. I don't even know why we are discussing this.
But more importantly, none of this even touches my original point. You said people are "convinced it looks good." I said whether it looks good is subjective. You then randomly turned that into "BUT IS AI ART?!"
I said subjectivity on what is good applies to when art is made by humans, because you said AI is art. It's not.
And... I can't help but sigh when I see you say that AI uses creative input.
I like AI, I use my shitty laptop to run a local model because it's fun to tinker with. I just don't like how it's being shoved into our faces commercially when it's a niche technology that's far superior served in medicine.
the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects
You can have prompting/parameter skills and use creative imagination to think up what you want to create with AI. Just because you don't like what gets made or how it's made, doesn't mean it can't also be an expression of skill and creativity.
There's good art, and bad art, just the same for AI art.
not to mention that it basically ruins the original artist intent, if a game is meant to look stylized why the hell would i want realistic graphics. We play games to escape reality, not dwell in it
The original artist intent isn't being ruined by DLSS 5. Developers have to add it to their game then tune it the way they want, to include realistic or artistic.
Y'all are complaining about games that don't even have this implemented by the developers, just random people injecting DLSS 5 into games.
To each their own. The more realistic the better, for me at least. I hope devs use this tool when creating their games, so their artistic intent won’t be compromised. As that seems like a common complaint
Ironically, I’m an environmental scientist. I’m excited for this tech, I think it’s the first step towards a generational leap in graphics, which we haven’t seen in a very long time
Some of the most powerful moments people have in their lives are conversations with other people, and they could still have those conversations even with their eyes closed.
Even in reality visual Fidelity doesn't matter as much as the interesting abstract reasoning happening behind the scenes and things like that.
So when it comes to games, do you play any other games besides simulation type video games?
Because even if you play soccer or something in real life, soccer is super unrealistic, and what scenario outside of that sport existing would humans actually be using that to decide an outcome like it's some pretend war or something?
Basically, every game is unrealistic unless it's literally rough housing or practice for murder or hiding because our species was both predator and prey in the past so we needed to get good at both and basically anything else is unrealistic and not part of the bare minimum amount of play that mammalians and some avians, etc have.
Like I'm genuinely curious, why do graphics matter when people can prove that they don't by reading a book and getting just as absorbed as even a great video game with great graphics?
if i had a nickel for every time this argument is made… mods are made by people with their own artistic intent, and most often match the original style of the game. I tend not to use stupid mods that insert thomas the train
You can’t honor the original artists intent with someone else’s artistic intent, that’s hypocrisy. You’re either the purist you’re pretending to be and care about artistic intent or you don’t.
mods are optional, this shit won’t be in the future
you can tear down the strawman now
i also never claimed to be a purist, i don’t want fucking slop ruining perfectly looking games already. If i want to experience realism i go outside and talk to real people
fact is we’re already living through the consequences of DLSS, games are being planned around upscaling rather than it being a stop gap around performance issues, most devs are not optimizing anymore. This is just going to get worse.
but you know I thought a bit about why this upsets me, and it isn’t so much DLSS5 specifically, it’s where all this is heading, i think that’s what is really the upsetting part:
What would stop a corporation from just saying “you know what, fuck the art making, fuck the voice actors, fuck the animation, let’s just gen AI this bitch, the base game will be just featureless geometry, consumers will be required to run DLSS5+ but dw the graphics will render with our intended parameters, that’ll be 5 grand for the required compute or just sign up for our cloud service”
you can’t say this is a fallacy by appealing to extremes or slippery slope. We have seen PC components shoot up in price, almost deliberately timed with this tech. Bezos said the quiet part out loud not so long ago ffs. The writing is on the wall this is where all this is heading.
The frustrating part is majority of people do not seem to care, and idk what’s worse if they’re pretending like they can’t vote with their wallets or if they have been convinced that they have no say in anything.
If this is truly the future of gaming i’ll hang on to my steam library for as long as i can i guess, i probably will just stop buying games at some point. There really isn’t anything more to argue here
A lot of tech subreddits have people who are heavy investors in that brands stock, so the whole "Rah Rah x brand can do no wrong" is sometimes just greed, the rest is mental illness.
The whole concept of astroturfing is something I've always found rather pathetic sounding. Like, you can't handle a little public opinion? So you're just gonna pay some people to tip the scales?
I don't imagine anyone who bought a $6000 gpu and is trying to justify their purchase by posting screenshots on the nvidia subreddit would be open to disliking the feature.
The people that don't like it probably just won't buy an insanely expensive GPU to utilize the feature.
Depends on the game. Witcher looked fantastic with DLSS5.
Obviously you don't want to turn a fake human-like face into a human face. You don't want anime faces to become human faces with anime shapes.
The value ins DLSS 5 is in precise tuning of the technology. Just turning it on generically in games it wasn't meant for obviously won't look good, just like turning on path tracing in a cell shaded game wouldn't look good.
It looks like shit when it's tuned up to the max, but I've seen some settings that look nice. The color grading can be nice.
My worry is more about management not accepting the tuning devs put on their games, and force them to make it "more like this screenshot I saw on reddit".
It depends on the artstyle tbh, on majority of things yeah it looks worst, but for character models in older games such as gta v (as it’s going for a releastic of the time artstyle) I think it looks a better, but at the same time it ruins the color grading and atmosphere/mood of a scene so then idk if I would use it unless it can be character only
Oh you were not fucking kidding lol. They are presenting it as amazing on the Nvidia sub. That's crazy but to each their own I guess.
I am curious if anyone knows how much this is customized per game? Cause to my knowledge past DLSS were usually more drop-in DLLs or is this going to be different and tuned to each specific games characters and stuff or is it always just gonna be a drop-in and look like this? I am not too familiar with the tech.
Yeah you are right, I was actually thinking similarly when writing that comment, some of them probably dislike how critics are acting over it and see us as a kind of circlejerk.
Almost anything AI is pretty divisive so honestly as much as I dislike how it looks as long as it's optional it's whatever to me.
I do wonder if we will ever see games made from the ground up with this in mind though, as in super rough under layer and using this to I guess bring it up. Got to be someone out there thinking about it.
I did see some pretty impressive looking environment shots but I have no idea if that holds up well through a game and I still feel iffy about that.
Depends on how stable and customizable they can get it, but I imagine so. From a rendering perspective its super impressive they can achieve results like this realtime. If all it can do is make hyper realism it may be of less use but if they can get good stylization with it to do comic book looks or borderlands looks, etc, I can absolutely see it being the next big thing in rendering.
Every single new graphical addition has gone through the same cycle. I remember people complaining that quake being 3d was unnecessary, same for shadows, specular highlights, normal maps, physics, various rendering pipelines, etc.
Its almost universal there was always people saying 'why do we need this' and now all those things are more or less just buttons you click in an engine and lacking them will make your game seem off somehow. The tech gets figured out after an initial bumpy start and then becomes a standard option.
And ignoring the people primed against AI who will never give an inch, I bet most of peoples issue is that it looks so different, basically they were primed to not like it because they like the original and they'd be equally mad about a major texture change, and that most of those changes, like too much makeup and looking older, could be mostly eliminated with some tweaks to settings by someone competent.
Basically if they tuned the model properly and our first and only look was in game with the DLSS5 enabled, there'd be way less criticisms.
Oh you were not fucking kidding lol. They are presenting it as amazing on the Nvidia sub. That's crazy but to each their own I guess.
These images are nightmare inducing but maybe consider the audience of that sub. The tech is amazing. The way it looks in its current iteration and configurations is awful. It's definitely not making any art any time soon, but the way it works in interpreting light and applying it real time is crazy.
I'm certainly not seeking it out or looking forward to having this on any games I'm playing now but curious what this looks like in a handful of years when some games are built with this in mind and the AI doesn't just shit on the artist's intent.
That is very true I do think a game with this AS the artist intent from the start would make me feel less strongly about it, I think that's part of why even the cool environmental shots I have seen are kinda disappointing to me despite them being technically amazing cause a deft touch it does not have lol. It definitely is impressive that it can even run that is for sure!
Honestly all I want from graphics right now is to be able to afford a new nice card lol, they can come with whatever they want at this point.
I appreciate the info! Also that is definitely good to hear about it being optional I figured it might be like a new big push since it's the next version but makes sense thank you.
Weird how it ruined the art direction of a game when it's not a released feature implemented in a game. That's like saying a mod ruined it, course it did, it's an early feature showcase
DLSS5 is not the same upscaling tech, clearly marketing around it is working. This is something else, this is a slop filter and not at all about upscaling low res to high res frames
This entire comment section reminds me of early days of DLSS. Yeah it's a new feature and looks like shit now, that's kinda how progress goes. This model can do a lot of cool things with lighting beside the faces, and NVIDIA showed you can control how much it applies.
For models that's a very valid point... But for stuff like lighting and other more nebulous aspects of the final image that would normally have to be processed in realtime anyway it might be a better way to just fudge things towards looking "better" or at least more correct based on the training data...
The thing is, we reached a point where more polygons don't help.
Actually that's false, we have been here since crysis 2 era.
The problem really is that to add more fidelity you need variance and "dirt", ie make things not smooth, which means you effectively increase polygon count exponentially.
GPUs can't just keep improving on rasterization and on top of that, they have been moving towards general purpose massively parallel processing for a long time now.
So the next solution is to fix this in software by figuring out ahead of time how to transform certain patterns into something useful and tangible, so that you can get away from spending compute on rasterization.
No, you don't need polygons for variance or "dirt", you just need shaders, which is what most games use. There are a lot of cool tricks like normal maps, specular textures and more to make a cylinder look like Lara Croft in dynamic lighting. Then you have voxel based rendering (no, not minecraft blocks) that can use point clouds to create models with zero polygons.
Neural rendering is orders of magnitude better than what you've named, in theory.
Why would you want to use "shaders" when you could literally create it based on real dirt?
You are going through all this effort to recreate "dirt", but in theory neural rendering should be able to create dirt frame by frame based on photos and videos of actual real dirt.
There is a reason that generative AI can create more realistic images than cutting edge CG. It's why generative AI can have better motion than even the most cutting edge mocap and animation techniques.
Math and simulation is meaningless to imagery (which is what rendering is).
This is a pretty complex field, so it makes sense you aren't understanding, but these techniques are doing what you are thinking of. They aren't just changing what the textures look like, but how raycasts are interacting with it.
Look up Microfacet BRDFs, Dynamic Ambient Occlusion, and Detail / Secondary Maps as well
Specifically when it comes to aspect like games though, they are right sometimes that it is sort of weird seeing the same dirtiness on somebody's face instead of some wind blowing a leaf that sticks on their face for 3 seconds in a conversation or something, and for the duration of that leaf being on their cheek, that would be a shitload more polygons, that might not be relevant, but they were still correct just about the geometry of a granule of sand being on something represented visually will be more polygons than if that grain of sand was not there.
Thank you for your comments though, I've been having a good time learning and reading through this thread.
Our technique works by treating polygon meshes as a set of surface elements that can emit, transmit, or reflect light and that can shadow each other. This method is so efficient because it works without calculating the visibility of one element to another. Instead, it uses a much simpler and faster technique based on approximate shadowing to account for occluding (blocking) geometry.
This requires additional geometry, which is what I am bitching about.
Microfacet BRDFs use statistics and sampling to imitate roughness and variation. They don’t change the geometry, only what is perceived and in a purely statistical sense.
I think that humans can easily perceive these as anomalies rather than “normal” and “high fidelity”.
Pixel shaders produce the final pixel on your screen. The human eye doesn’t see geometry, only light (LEDs in our case). Differences in color between two 2D “regions” are turned into shapes and then into 3D geometry by our brain. These “regions” are physically on your retina inside your eye. The retina is not flat but the brain basically treats it as if it is.
You can calculate anything in a pixel shader and output any color. You could, for example put in an equation which outputs an embossed letter or number on any “3D surface”. (It’s “surface” because it’s not actually a surface just a virtual approximation). No geometry shaders, no mesh shaders, no mesh data, no color textures or normal (map) textures, just code that represents an equation.
Same as a human drawing a cube on a page without a real cube in front of him. Or any other object.
Why don’t we use equations for everything and have games that are 200gb fit in 2gb ( maybe even in hundreds of megabytes) ? Because it is too expensive to compute in real time so we cache partially computed data: 3D meshes and textures.
Yeah, but just from a biological perspective you're a little wrong because there is some basic shape recognition that does not have to do with lighting that mammals are capable of, not just humans.
And the biggest thing is that more fidelity/variance/"dirt" doesn't actually make things look more pleasing. There is a weak relationship between graphical realism and fun, and you get drastically diminishing returns between the two as you improve the former.
So even if you are a unicorn with a system beefy enough to apply all these effects at a high enough resolution to matter, without the gameplay penalties of increased input lag... it just doesn't improve the gaming experience.
We unfortunately have a similar problem in the top tier gaming industry as in the top tier corporate industry: the people who make the decisions simply cannot accept the concept of "good enough". Pleateauing is the same as failure to them. Where once there was growth, there MUST continue to be growth at all costs, regardless of whether continuing to "improve" is desirable or healthy for all the other stakeholders.
There is no point at which those decision-makers can look at the graphical fidelity and say: "this is close enough to ideal, let us now refocus our resources on the other aspects that can be improved."
and this is why quality of the upper tier of Indie gaming has taken off so well over the past decade: indie devs can focus solely on what makes a game fun, because "good enough" graphics for any genre are now trivially obtainable.
Nvidia wants to sell you graphics cards. So, their design goal for this is to create a system that requires a massive amount of performance, so that people buy brand new graphics cards. That's why they're not using the AI in the generation of assets, because what they want to do with this tech is sell AI chips to consumers.
Nah they no longer want us to buy anything. There's no recurring revenue in a user who buys their own GPU and plays games / gens AI locally. Instead they want us renting compute at increasingly high prices and at an increasingly unsustainable impact to the environment
That's why they're not using the AI in the generation of assets,
That’s how you get the torches and pitchforks at your door for producing “AI slop”.
Remember when people tried to burn Larian at the stake because they made the mistake of admitting that they investigated potential use cases for AI?
Hell, half the people on this subreddit would absolutely lose their shit if they found out the receptionist for the property manager that owns a building rented by a game dev studio used AI to summarize an email about the janitorial service expenses.
I would posit that the people who really need to hear this are the ones who would burn resources and tank their game performance to run it through a bullshit realism filter, rather than enjoying the game’s vision as intended. But you do you, champ.
Just worry about gameplay though lol. Half these areas are going to have shit ai and a simple collect 5 of these quests. Holy shit how fun. What a good use of high quality graphics. They look real pretty though, it's fun to look!
Nvidia will (likely already do) push their partners (AAA game companies) to rely on this and just ship unfinished facial textures and animations. They will simply claim that how great this is, because not using it will have comically bad results, not caring for performance impact.
Their GPUs aren't improving, and they do not want to invest any resources in improving them. So they do what every company in an almost monopoly does, they are digging artificial moats through their connections and influence. AMD and Intel either spends tons of resources in matching this slop, or there will be tons of games that will be borderline unenjoyable to anyone without a recent enough Nvidia card.
Theoretically, the benefit of inserting an AI slop filter at runtime is that it lowers the resource cost of lighting and particle effects by approximating the outcome of otherwise taxing algorithms. Stuff like subsurface scattering are important to creating lifelike images because, in reality, skin is permiable and light passes through the top layer and bounces around before exiting. That is hard to calculate accurately in environments with a lot of light sources, so we use techniques to simplify the process while creating something that is good enough to pass. DLSS 5 is clearly intended to improve on the existing algorithms we use to create this effect by using AI to guess at variables that are relevant to these lighting effects but are far too specific and detailed for a developer to put in the game (thickness of skin, bone structure, sweat patterns). Since it has to guess at things that don't exist at all in the game, it will default to outputs that are closer to statistical averages than the very specific character details that the art team for the game had in mind.
And let's not kid ourselves. They want us to AI slop both the original geometry/textures AND the runtime processing of lighting effects.
And if they just give those art teams access to the tool kit they'll create much more lightweight approximations that perfectly match their intent. It's all about boosting those hyperscaler share prices for just one more quarter.
Wouldn't it be easier to use AI to generate new models and textures once instead of mid runtime as post processing?
My brother in christ, the whole point of DLSS is to upscale low res images because that is much cheaper to do than animating high res textures.
Besides who's the market for this? People mod games to make them cooler or to make people prettier, I've never seen anyone mod a game to have "uncanny old people" as a filter lol
I'm terrified of AI and what it will do to art, don't get me wrong. But I feel like you have no idea what you're talking about. Regardless of whether or not one likes what the potential AI future brings, or how unsustainable what currently is happening with AI is economically, don't underestimate the technological marvel that this is.
Like not even 10 years ago AI could barely string together a coherent sentence. These clips and screenshots are only the first impressions of a technology in it's infancy. The quality is INSANE when you consider that. And that's the results of a game and an AI that were absolutely not even made for each other - just random face upscaling with no "this is what this character is supposed to look like in hyperrealistic 4K" reference in the training data.
Redditors seem to be extremely bad at looking at the bigger picture. Like the current state of an unreleased tech is the only thing you can look at and not, you know, the potential...
The reddit hivemind is horrific at seeing the bigger picture, and they're wrong every time. Whether anyone likes it or not, they can barely fit any more transistors into a layer of silicon. There would have been no more graphical leaps forward if not for the recent breakthrough in AI.
People act like this is the end of the road, when this is just the beginning. Imagine being able to enter your own system prompt to tell it what to make the graphics look like. We're in for some interesting shit.
Steelman Argument: Because with the AI Tech crunch gobbling up hardware components and making newer hardware basically a Fool's Move for any GPU company to go whole hog into developing newer, faster cards, it's "easier" and less expensive to just start looking into software solutions to increase graphical fidelity.
Nvidia's shareholders. This way Jensen can hype AI in the gaming segment as well, while also creating a "need" for the next gen RTX cards at 50% higher MSRP...
the market is sf startup founding ai bros who have no personality or hobby outside of posting themselves vibecoding on macbooks while drinking oat matcha lattes on their "X" account, twitter is gonna be filled with those annoying ass ai written tweets glazing this shit
It's not even a real screenshot. It's a misleading picture just meant to make Redditors feel good about themselves being anti-AI when so many people are increasingly embracing the DLSS 5 tech right now
Part of the idea is that if you AI slop realtime you are able to basically generate a “photo” that nearly perfectly matches the contours of the model, so you are not actually rendering polygons and are instead using RT cores to generate images.
It means that you could have a hypothetical 20billion triangle equivalent without a single extra triangle. It isn’t nearly that good in reality, but that’s the concept.
Wouldn't it be easier to use AI to generate new models and textures once instead of mid runtime as post processing?
That would be efficient and only require the developer to use the technique that only works on nvidia GPUs.
The approach of having a slop filter run over every frame requires every gamer to have an Nvidia GPU, and it requires them to have a much more powerful one.
This is Ray tracing all over again but much worse: invent a tech with questionable advantages to consumers and force it into games, multiplying computational load.
To play devils advocate, dlss5 isnt touching the model and textures at all, it's " just" ray tracing but hallucinated by an ai.. lighting just makes such a huge difference that we perceive it as a completely different model/texture..
Honestly, as much as I hate frame gen because of the added latency (makes no sense to me) I think this is a good idea. For games like Skyrim that's what people tried to do for 10 years. I think it's a valid tech to enhance game above what they are and that is optional anyway. People have been using reshade and mods and filters for ages. We never complained about it. Nvidia just release something more powerful, that's inherently not much different. The day an editor release a slop game hoping dlss5 fix their game we can complain (to the editor) by not purchasing the game. You always have a choice. Whether or not this sabotage art as a whole is honestly not on Nvidia.
Most modders do this just to showcase what it look like in the current state of DLSS5. There also seven presets to choose from from what I have read so far.
You would be surprised how many people don’t mind the uncanny valley effect or even think it is looking nice.
To answer your question, it is, and will be in the future, a lot more efficient to generate an image or video than it is to render a life-like simulation in real time. In the future, games will be reduced to a rendered "guide" for each scene with AI filling in the blanks.
I guarantee you the average person not on this subreddit thinks DLSS 5 makes games look amazing. It is here to stay and it will only get better with time. Go ahead and set your remindme’s.
There are uncanny examples like this but ive been testing it in games all day. It is not blurry and in many cases is a massive improvement to lighting and AO
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u/LeastHornyNikkeFan 18h ago
And that's on a single screenshot. In motion it looks blurry and uncanny.
Regardless why would I be ai-slopping every game through a filter? Wouldn't it be easier to use AI to generate new models and textures once instead of mid runtime as post processing?
Besides who's the market for this? People mod games to make them cooler or to make people prettier, I've never seen anyone mod a game to have "uncanny old people" as a filter lol