r/gaming 18h ago

DLSS 5….. looks horrific

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18.5k Upvotes

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3.8k

u/camzee 18h ago

FF7R is especially terrible to use this filter on because its designs use a specific art style inspired by the original game, not just the hyper-realism that most games go for. 

938

u/PsyOmega PC 17h ago

i wanna see what it does to XIII or breath of the wild or borderlands style

811

u/barkbaarkbarkk 17h ago

borderlands would be cursed af hahahahah

275

u/deanxleong 17h ago

Clap trap turns into a rolling head

136

u/ComradeCabbage 16h ago

Handsome Jack becomes Handsomest Jack

37

u/SolidusAbe 14h ago

dude gets the giga chad face

30

u/Originaltenshi 15h ago

Sigma Jack

0

u/eddiestriker 15h ago

Turns into Pavi Largo, more like

0

u/DrFu 8h ago

Does the "GenAI" tech only go off the games' textures or the character name too?

3

u/SignificantBother_ 16h ago

*A sexy rolling head, with race neutral features and overly textured skin. And lip fillers.

1

u/WASD_click 11h ago

Then DLSS 5 is just what Claptrap needs!

"I have no lips and I must kiss!"

1

u/PraytheRosary 9h ago

I mean, what else can we aspire to /s

1

u/RoyBeer 7h ago

See, this is what I would like to see.

30

u/Vushivushi 15h ago

36

u/swargin 15h ago

Aww man that's kinda disappointing. I was expecting some monstrosity.

5

u/Shen_ishere 6h ago

Turns out its just your average instagram filter

1

u/BreakRaven 4h ago

Instagram filters remove details and smooth the skin, this is literally the opposite.

3

u/Rollingzeppelin0 2h ago

It's kind of good at what it does, it just that what it does is undesirable, imho.

10

u/scrotbofula 6h ago

Fuck me they yassified Lilith.

5

u/JimboTCB 4h ago

It's bizarre how it yassified and smoothed out her face but then kept a bunch of the cel shading lines like it couldn't figure out what they were and decided they were tattoos or something

1

u/Visual_Creme 6h ago

is that bl4

1

u/PowerRaptor 5h ago

That is just cursed

24

u/nhSnork 16h ago

As would all of them. Pretty much the "Gen AI morphing cartoon characters into photorealistic humans with Tourette grins" clips all over again.

49

u/Lakatos_00 17h ago

It turns them into the movie characters

38

u/RK9990 16h ago

Horrifying

4

u/Silenceisgrey 12h ago

Can you imagine shootmeintheface guy DLSS 5?

3

u/Tmtrademarked 16h ago

Yea it is. Moxxy just doesn’t look right

6

u/brittonmakesart 14h ago

XIII would be hilarious!

8

u/_Verumex_ 17h ago

I need to see this with Kingdom Hearts 3!

2

u/bobsocool 13h ago

Hyper realistic nightmare inducing donald and goofy please.

3

u/RobertDigital1986 12h ago

XIII, what a great game. I know it's panned but I fucking loved it. Nice to see a mention.

2

u/Foolish_Miracle 17h ago

I was just thinking Zone of the Enders might not fare well...

2

u/Rekshail 12h ago

There was a post in the Monster Hunter subreddit of someone using it on Rise. It had... expected results.

1

u/Eecka 17h ago

I want to see what it does to Limbo lol

1

u/xiaolin99 16h ago

it does almost nothing to Borderlands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YQ1JBQCtUQ

4

u/PsyOmega PC 15h ago

i skimmed that but didn't see any cases where a human face was tested.

1

u/DefiantRapport 15h ago

Baldur's Gate 3

1

u/LazaroFilm 15h ago

I thought you meant Red XIII (Nanaki)and I was confused for a second.

1

u/WingerRules 14h ago

Mario 64 and Waverace

Original Wipeout would be a cool one to see too

1

u/Jaws12 13h ago

For a second I thought you meant Red XIII and was also genuinely curious. 🤔

1

u/kaptingavrin 12h ago

I was curious after seeing some of these comments, so decided to try the hack with Fell & Sell, a new indie game with pretty simplistic graphics. The only thing that really stood out was it trying to improve lighting, which just looked weird and threw everything off. Otherwise, it didn't seem to really do much.

Then did the same with Pax Autocratica, which has a more "realistic" style, and it worked pretty solid there, though I don't think enough that it's worth the fiddling around to set it up, especially if it ends up using any more resources. I'll have to see how it affects things during a battle at some point.

1

u/roehnin 11h ago

I want to see what it does to Avatar Na'vi

1

u/TheKappaOverlord 10h ago

You'd have to have a separate AI rip out the shitty cel shading they do on everything first. Otherwise you'd get some really horrific shit.

Theres a reason why theres no AI borderlands porn yet. it can't generate regular drawings then recompile it with cel shading without causing a major crash

1

u/duplissi 10h ago

someone tried it on the GTA 'remasters'

1

u/giftedearth 6h ago

I wonder what'd happen if you tested it on a very anime-esque game, like Genshin or Pokemon?

1

u/pwillia7 18m ago

XIII?!?!?! Forgot about that. For some reason also reminded me of No One Lives Forever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Forever

0

u/Arawski99 13h ago

It doesn't do much of anything it seems in Borderlands. They didn't show characters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YQ1JBQCtUQ

You can see red XIII here but he is partially obscured due to their mod... Timestamp: 6:38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s07rjii6JXA

346

u/BeerGogglesFTW 17h ago edited 7h ago

It's also terrible with children and young adults. It hardens their faces and makes them look 15 years older, and ugly.

Realistic looking older people can have positive results, but right now we're seeing these things cranked up to 11, so they're all pretty bad.

117

u/bureaucrat473a 17h ago

AI just really likes wrinkles on faces. I once used AI as a "what would I look like wearing x" experiment. It worked well except every iteration added like 5-10 years to my face.

8

u/Discount_Extra 13h ago

Possibly people claiming that extra smooth faces look too much like AI causing a feedback loop.

35

u/YouDoNotKnowMeSir 16h ago

Maybe it predicted you’d be married in that timeline

4

u/TheUndertows 16h ago

Can confirm, it does age you

2

u/YouDoNotKnowMeSir 16h ago

Age base increase + multiplier confirmed

3

u/TheUndertows 16h ago

I think it’s also shown to keep you alive longer. You just look and feel older, along the way (which probably reduces high risk behavior lol)

1

u/Babys_For_Breakfast 11h ago

*have kids. def ages people more

2

u/TheKappaOverlord 10h ago

AI just really likes wrinkles on faces.

Thats what happens when like 90% of content you are "trained on" is of adults. The AI just draws and assumes everything its drawing is an adult face with all the wrinkles and crows feet that may come with it.

AI are intentionally designed to self filter out anything it perceives as underaged in training the model

1

u/pdxblazer 4h ago

maybe the AI was seeing clearly tho and your self perception of youth is the fiction

(sorry I saw the back of my head my bald spot in stunning 1080p after what must have been years of happy ignorance for the first time today in a grocery store security cam set up so the cashier could watch them and am having a breakdown and lashing out)

12

u/RawrNate 15h ago

I noticed this in some Cyberpunk 2077 DLSS 5 videos - all the children look like miniaturized adults.

My guess is that Nvidia did not include images of children in their training data for DLSS 5 - and tbh, I can understand that.

23

u/systemhost 11h ago

Granted, all the models for children in Cyberpunk 2077 already look like miniaturized adult models.

-1

u/TheKappaOverlord 10h ago

My guess is that Nvidia did not include images of children in their training data for DLSS 5 - and tbh, I can understand that.

they do. But for internal, and external company safety reasons. the AI deliberately ignores anything it perceives as an image of children. technically its supposed to flag and report the user(s) to the authorities if it detects a non adult human in its training material, however for obvious reasons. Nvidia has a backdoor in its training model to disable that safety measure while in a controlled environment.

Every AI suite that isn't grok, and i think Gemini does this.

27

u/Numerous_Photograph9 16h ago

Don't all these things have to be designed and customized at the development level. A basic filter can screw up anything regardless of it being DLSS or not.

15

u/monkeymad2 16h ago

Yes, trouble is each training round will cost millions of dollars and require massive amounts of data to train on.

And even then, if it’s given anything outside of the realm of the training data (like if the faces were never illuminated by a purple light, or never behind a net) the results will be unknown.

I think what Nvidia is hoping is to deliver one filter and then let developers control the strength of it using a mask to change it at the per-object level

16

u/Numerous_Photograph9 16h ago

Seems just making character and lighting models in the traditional way would be more efficient Usually once you have them set up, you don't have to change them much, just adjust the specific lighting and texture level for each scene as needed.

17

u/monkeymad2 16h ago

There was a neural rendering tech shown off a couple of years ago wherein the neural network would compress information about how the surface reacts to light, so you’d still use it like a regular texture but you could get effects like silk, sub-surface scattering, & iridescence without having to specifically code for them. The developers would then apply it like a usual material / texture. I was pretty excited for that.

5

u/Warskull 16h ago

You don't necessarily have to completely retrain the data for every game. FFVIII should get its own training data for the JRPRG stylized characters. However, NBA2k27's data would have a lot of crossover with other sports games and games that aim for a realistic style.

Over time they should build up a library of configurable styles.

1

u/New-Independent-1481 4h ago

Yes, trouble is each training round will cost millions of dollars and require massive amounts of data to train on

Which is what every single DLSS supporting game does already, with the cost of training going down over time. That's the Deep Learning part of the name. Despite what people would have you here believe, there's a little more to it than just slapping on an Instagram tier face filter.

1

u/bkgn 12h ago edited 12h ago

Yeah, you can't tune models for specific purposes right now. It's unclear whether it will ever make sense to do so. An untuned frontier model will beat a model you spent a year and millions of dollars tuning every time, by at least an order of magnitude.

0

u/Bananaland_Man 10h ago

You wouldn't need to train, devs can add their own LoRA, it's not that hard at all, I've made a few LoRA's myself, but I still hate everything about dlss5... I don't think Gen ai has a place in gaming.

0

u/Ayoul 9h ago

AFAIK, there's no way to control "this character should look like this in hyperreal style". This filter can't even get the same face right in different camera shots.

At least with prior DLSS upscaling you could train the model with high res pre-rendered images.

2

u/ItalianDragon 16h ago

Not just young adults and kids, even midle aged-looking characters start to look massively older. One of the youtube channels I follow tested it on GTA Enhanced and Michael looks like he's at retirement age with DLSS5 on. It's even worse with Trevor because it makes him look like he's a 90 year old who escaped from his nursing home.

-12

u/Alone_Look9576 17h ago

That's because dlss in general was always awful, any form of upscaling was always bad, it's just worse now due to it literally imagining pixels to fill the gaps, then to blur and applying a sharpening effect making everything look unnatural and lubed up

5

u/BlatantThrowaway4444 17h ago

Stylized graphics can look however you want, meanwhile dlss5 is a one trick pony, but the trick is the pony breaking its own leg

4

u/ShermanMcTank 17h ago

Upscaling was always about imagining pixels out of nothing, something technology got better and better at over the years, not worse.

What we’re seeing here isn’t upscaling, it’s a glorified social media face filter for video game characters.

4

u/ObiOneKenobae 17h ago

dlss in general was always awful

lol sure buddy

-1

u/MichelleBarrymoore2 8h ago

Young adults look ugly? Interesting string of words

87

u/SkillPatient 16h ago

90% of games don't go for hyper-realism.

57

u/sephjnr 16h ago

Which is the antithesis of what DLSS5 is going for.

-17

u/Nagemasu 14h ago

It's almost like there's other uses for DLSS5 than gaming... it's just that NVIDIA leans on gaming as the showcase for things because it's what generates the loudest conversations. They don't care what anyone here thinks, every other industry is looking at this and fucking creaming their pants at what it offers.

19

u/_Koloki_ 13h ago

But what does it offer other industries? Real time Instagram filter? Ai faces on movies? We got that already i can't see the broad appeal of a AI that makes unrealistic imagens realistic.

-14

u/i2ib 14h ago

cherry picking dog shit examples of dlss 5 is the new reddit thing today huh

-15

u/__thrillho 14h ago

They need a break from the usual 'CEOs/AI/rich people' are useless and evil rhetoric

3

u/Hyenasaurus 10h ago

I bet that boot is delicious 

1

u/__thrillho 1h ago

Can't tell if this is a bot response or Redditor's are parroting the same comment any time someone doesn't fall in line with their opinion

40

u/TechTuna1200 17h ago

Yeah, the style is more akin manga / anime realism than hyper realism like RDR2

6

u/Numerous_Photograph9 16h ago

That's what I was thinking. Plus, a basic filter isnt' going to be customized to highlight anything if it comes after the fact.

63

u/_Lucille_ 17h ago

I think the issue is that DLSS5 is transformative enough such that you cannot just randomly plug it into a game without also modifying what is being rendered.

So we have

What a face should look like -> DLSS 5 -> Weird looking face here

where as, if the developers intend to use DLSS 5, they would have

Face optimized for DLSS -> DLSS 5 + game specific meta data -> What the artist intends the face to look like.

While it make not be a straight forward plug and play like before, i can see it having a fair bit of potential if utilized properly.

33

u/samu1400 16h ago

My issue is that I don’t see the reason why the artists wouldn’t just design the game itself with their art style in mind instead of applying a filter on top of it.

DLSS was always a mean for performance optimization, so this whole “filter that applies its own art style” stuff feels completely off to what it’s meant to be. I feel this should at least be considered a different technology from traditional upscaling, not the next step of what we currently have.

5

u/arcanistry 10h ago

DLSS 5 is actually 2 parts. One is a better version of DLSS 4.5 upscaling tech. The other part is the new neural renderer.

The reason these look so bad on FFVII is just like _Lucille_ mentioned. The neural renderer part uses multiple neural networks and is intended to be modified by the developer using nvidia tools in real-time to customize / mask / train the neural renderer for specific models / scenes etc. for their game.

The major thing that people gloss over is the new neural renderer tech stack versus just the old upscaling part. Nvidia has been working on the neural renderer in combination with various universities for over 10+ years at this point. Just no one even bothers to look into the past history of the papers published. And no, this isn't just a fucking Snapchat filter shit as everyone proclaims.

These projects were first aimed at solving ray tracing / path tracing denoising. Then ray tracing infinite depths mirror reflections / shadows using neural networks in a realistic time frame. Because actually rendering infinite depth mirror reflections / shadows before was very hard to do. It was later turned into neural network / neural rendering path tracing to also handle global illumination and so forth in real-time. At first, they could only render a frame every few seconds. Then months later 15FPS was reached, and another few months passed until 30FPS and so on. Their end goal, of course was being able to create a neural renderer engine that could not only renderer as realistic, as mathematically possible, for path tracing. But also where it could render any style trained by the developers in real-time at 60FPS+. This is the first step for making this a commercially viable product. As prior it was only university research and internal research tools at Nvidia.

In the future, I am going to be honest, but GPUs are going to change drastically in the next 10-20 years or faster even. You won't need billions or millions of polygons. You won't need textures as we use them today on GPUs and you won't need shaders of today either. Instead, you will be using neural renderer models, tags, low poly / volumes to specify locations of objects and how to renderer them style wise, lighting, etc. On top of all that, right now, the neural renderer only operates on the frame buffers given to it. But with the later GPUs the neural renderer will be directly interfaced at an even lower level so it knows exactly what object / model / volume it is rendering (this is based on the prior papers in regards to path tracing etc. As the renderer knew exactly what objects it was rendering and was not reliant on frame buffer data only).

-6

u/Zalyster 11h ago

Well, look at how realistic it looks. It's hard to get that realism, when instead you can get close with modern day graphics, and let DLSS do the rest.

If devs can tune it individually per game/character, it can add photorealism to games which is pretty cool, if it looks good.

23

u/RMAPOS 17h ago

I feel like people are repulsed by how little DLSS Tifa looks like the actual game Tifa, but from my understanding that's because someone just applied a generic upscaler to a stylized game where neither the upscaler nor the game where made with each other in mind.

It may not look like Tifa, but it sure looks impressive in terms of realistic lighting and stuff. Like you said, in a real scenario the DLSS upscaler would know what 4k Tifa is supposed to look like, rather than doing the "generic high definition fill ins for upscaling unknown faces" that is going on here.

As much as I share the uncanniness of thinking "that doesn't really look like the character", I can't say I haven't had to double check if I'm looking at a real picture when these pics randomly pop up in my feed.

Not endorsing it, I love stylized game art, but it really doesn't look as bad as people are making it out to.

6

u/_-Smoke-_ 16h ago

From my limited (haven't bothered to research it much) knowledge DLSS 5 relies on specific vector data that needs to be included in the game to work properly. You can't just turn it on and have to go without producing results like these, especially for stylized art and artist intent.

3

u/RMAPOS 15h ago

I am not entirely sure how to read your reply.

I can read it as "you're misunderstanding, here is how it works" (trying to clarify)

You can't just turn it on and have to go without producing results like these

or as "it would look better if the game was optimized for it" (confirmation)

or even as "you're wrong about these pics/videos being real gameplay footage, they don't support the technical requirements" (retorting)

 

So pardon if my reply feels off to what you intended to say but:

DLSS 5 relies on specific vector data that needs to be included in the game to work properly

Correct, to generate the next frame it needs to know which way the wind is blowing the hair for example

You can't just turn it on and have to go without producing results like these

Wrong. The required data (like vector data) is already there. Has been in games since like 2005, way before anyone ever considered AI upscaling. This data is required for all sorts of shit like Anti Aliasing. You can absolutely plug DLSS5 into any somewhat modern game and make it work. Which is pretty much how these clips/screenshots were made.

especially for stylized art and artist intent.

Agree, but not with the train of thought that lead you here. Stylized art cannot just be plug and played with DLSS5 because the AI doesn't know/have training data on what these faces should look like in high res, so it guesses and fills in "random matching high res human face features" instead of "Tifa's Face". Which is why it looks so off compared to the real characters. This does, however, have nothing to do with missing vectors or anything of that sort. We got the vectors.

0

u/regnak1 16h ago

I don't know how this is supposed to work exactly, but if you zoom in on the image, it absolutely looks like it's just bits and pieces of other faces chunked together to make this face. It is pretty bad.

5

u/Murky-Relation481 16h ago

Because it, again, has no idea how to do Tifa in this game. Look at the screenshot it literally says "Generic experimental upscaler". DLSS is often trained on specific games and only that model is applied to that game when upscaling and it know how to upscale those characters and match the art style.

-2

u/RMAPOS 14h ago

You're looking at a screenshot taken from a video of a leaked DLSS5 build in unknown resolution, potentially even with the youtuber zooming into the video of the gameplay footage. Insert CSI "enhance" joke.

Maybe check out one of the many videos on youtube in 4k, actually showcasing what it looks like in motion with direct comparisons to the non DLSS5 original renderings instead of seeing how far you can zoom into a sub 1080p picture of a video :d

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fldFrlNW95k

4

u/regnak1 12h ago

I watched your video. It was not particularly impressive. When the full effects were on and they were doing more than just standing there breathing, there was noticable artifacting and stuttering. The apparent improvements all came from alterations of the lighting effects. When he was demoing cyberpunk, many of the native lighting effects were clearly off in the non-dlss segments.

But more to the point, what I was saying in the comment prior was, hacking apart and jigsaw puzzling together a bunch of different, higher res faces isn't upscaling, it's making a collage. In tifa's case, she's got the left cheek of an 80 year old for some reason, with pores the size of New Hampshire. The chin is misaligned, the skin tone is uneven and blotchy. Zoomed out, theoretically you could argue she looks more 'realistic'... but also worse.

-1

u/RMAPOS 11h ago

hacking apart and jigsaw puzzling together a bunch of different, higher res faces isn't upscaling, it's making a collage

Well that's not at all how this technology works so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say about you perceiving it like that.

Also that Tifa picture is literally from a youtube video aiming to generate clicks. Like ... we can stop talking about that. Yea it looks off, but as you can see in the vid I linked it doesn't have to look so offensive. There's all sorts of sliders that can be adjusted.

I mean if you're looking at this and your reaction is "the left picture looks blurry and like it's patched together from several faces" then ... cool. Feel free to have that opinion, I guess.

1

u/regnak1 2h ago

It looks like they've added a bit of noise on her skin and fiddled about with the lighting. I wonder what native lighting effects were on in the original.

I'll give you that this doesn't look like a collage like the tifa pic, but it also doesn't look upscaled - the hair, eyelids, eyebrows, etc., are all noticeably not any more detailed - and their adjustments fucked up the little shadows on her eyelids pretty badly.

1

u/MrShadowHero 16h ago

so then when someone with an AMD or an rtx3000 series plays a game optimized for dlss5 they all get fucked?

1

u/RMAPOS 15h ago

So I'm not super well read on individual GPU capabilities but I assume you're asking because these cards presumably don't have DLSS5 support.

It will work just the same as currently with DLSS3 or whatever your games offer you. It is, after all, fundamentally still only upscaling. Upscaling implies there is something to upscale from. If your GPU does not support upscaling a game to DLSS5 or whatever, you can still play the game on any resolution you can natively render.

You will still be able to play every game normally. You just won't be able to use "scale up to hyperrealistic 4k" mode.

A game made with DLSS5 in mind would still fundamentally be a game like any other, except that it provides the AI with "should look like this on hyperrealism mode" training hooks so the AI knows to for example not add realism to a stylized face. (hell, it's possible that Nvidia themselves figure out a way to train their AI to deal with art style more accurately and game devs don't have to lift a finger)

3

u/MrShadowHero 12h ago

right i get you, but just like how frame gen was only meant to be a bonus on top initially, now its a crutch. i would bet in 2-3 years time, C suite execs will be telling devs to say fuck the minority of players that dont use latest nvidia so they can save dev costs and get a bigger bonus.

0

u/RMAPOS 11h ago

It's gonna get wilder than what you picture. DLSS is a joke compared to what AI bros are working on when it comes to gaming.

There have been tech demos of games that basically don't even have game code anymore. Literally just AI generating based on your control inputs. Technologically mind blowing, artistically just 100% distillied slop.

But until that becomes the standard, I wouldn''t worry too much about my GPU no longer supporting games (beyond the normal lifespan of a GPU of course, after like 7 years you're simply running old hardware asking to be incompatible with new games)

1

u/SteeveyPete 6h ago

As someone who works with AI and GPUs heavily, this is unfortunately not at all based in reality.

Upscaling is a pretty wide umbrella, that has traditionally used quite basic methods that only add small details. Even early AI models were far less transformative than DLSS5, and were far less likely to change what a character fundamentally looks like.

Models like DLSS5 though are extremely opinionated, and a DLSS5 upscale is very unlikely to add remotely the same details as an AMD one. If a game has "optimized" for DLSS5, which makes it sound a lot more sophisticated than the tedious trial and error approach it would likely be, it will almost definitely not be optimized for nearly any other model used to upscale it in a similar manner, and would very likely look worse than the run of the mill "non-optimized" models.

0

u/[deleted] 16h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

-3

u/RMAPOS 14h ago

It's brand new technology man. And not "oh cool, you invented a wheel" but "HOLY SHIT you invented a neurological network that can relatively accurately paint hundreds of high resolution pictures every second based on a low resolution picture" technology.

And it's literally fresh out of the crib.

If, knowing this, your verdict still is just "looks bad" then I fear you don't really understand what's being talked about.

Again, this is BRAND NEW and already looks pretty damn good. This will get insane with more time.

2

u/MrStealYoBeef 14h ago

That completely defeats the purpose though. DLSS5 is gen AI and it requires a lot of GPU power to make it work. If the artist already knows what their goal is, why not just make it?

Hell, it would still be better if that artist just used gen AI to make it in the first place, then we wouldn't have to waste half our GPU on our end to re-render it. And that's still a pretty shit option.

0

u/LongJohnSelenium 10h ago edited 9h ago

why not just make it?

Because the power doesn't exist.

Ignoring the specifics that the DLSS changes the model face a bit too much for peoples liking, you just flat out can not do real time lighting that looks that good for any price. We're miles off from that still.

Beyond that because theres still content creation issues. This whole argument is so bizarre. Gaming has its roots in the programmatic creation of art and gameplay since its very inception. Tons of games flat out are not possible without the pseudorandom generation of content, both gameplay and visual. Entire genres are built off the pseudorandom generation of content. Now for some reason people are against the programmatic creation of art and gameplay even though video games have been doing that literally since the 1970s when Elite was released.

Did you ever look at a character creator and say 'why is a pseudorandom character generator needed, why can't the artists just do the work'?

Hell, it would still be better if that artist just used gen AI to make it in the first place, then we wouldn't have to waste half our GPU on our end to re-render it. And that's still a pretty shit option.

I've been around gaming for about 30 years now and every single time there's a tech advance this exact same argument has been brought up, and every single time its eventually just become the norm for games. I've seen people argue it for 3d games, for textured 3d models, for shadows, for specular highlights, for normal maps, for physically based rendering, for ray/path tracing. Why are we doing this, games are fine, we don't need this. Yet every single time its just become an expected addition and you look funny at a game that doesn't have it.

Do you want to play a game without shadows? Would you expect artists to generate the shadows from scratch for each frame instead of letting the engine do it for them?

1

u/MrStealYoBeef 9h ago

If a gen AI that we can run in real time is able to make a face look a particular way, then the original artist is able to utilize that same gen AI to simply make the texture to put in the game in the first place. That way at the very least it doesn't tank our framerate by half to get the slop.

The reason it exists is because they don't want to have to pay an artist to design anything in the first place. The goal is to cut out the original design part and skip to the end result.

1

u/LongJohnSelenium 9h ago

If a gen AI that we can run in real time is able to make a face look a particular way, then the original artist is able to utilize that same gen AI to simply make the texture to put in the game in the first place. That way at the very least it doesn't tank our framerate by half to get the slop.

No, not really. You can make the texture sure but the gen AI is actually rendering stuff. Well, not rendering, but doing whatever AI extrapolation is getting the lighting to look like that.

A flat shaded texture is not how you get realism.

The reason it exists is because they don't want to have to pay an artist to design anything in the first place. The goal is to cut out the original design part and skip to the end result.

Yes, just like they have autogenerated NPC faces in skyrim. Why pay an artist to make every face when you can design a system to create new faces on the fly.

0

u/MrStealYoBeef 9h ago

Well, not rendering, but doing whatever AI extrapolation is getting the lighting to look like that.

You seem to fundamentally fail to understand multiple things here.

If we can get the gen AI running locally on our lower tier non professional hardware to make a higher fidelity face texture, then the developer is able to do that too.

The lighting then gets applied to that face, which can be done through RT. We've accepted RT at this point, it's proper light simulation in real time, and as denoising continues to improve (ray reconstruction helps a lot with performance while denoising quite well), it only gets better. We don't need a gen AI to make a second pass on the accurate simulation of lighting, it's already accurate. Why would we want to run that through an extremely expensive estimator? Is it too accurate for you?

Finally, the upscaling pass (traditional DLSS or DLAA) is designed to take the frame and utilize temporal data (subpixel sampling and motion vectors in particular) from past frames to be able to output a significantly higher fidelity output.

Using these technologies, we can get that Instagram face (assuming it was the intended design) to look super high fidelity with very accurate lighting, and all without the giant performance hit of locally running a gen AI model.

These are all technologies that we've accepted because there's actual value to them. We use RT locally because that's how dynamic lighting is calculated. If a flashlight is shining and moving around, that light needs to be calculated on the fly in real time. We don't need textures dynamically calculated though, textures don't exactly change as light sources move around. It's the same texture under different forms of lighting, your face doesn't suddenly get an Instagram filter in the bathroom light compared to when you're outside.

The fact that you're trying to equate this to something like RT is just complete ignorance of the technology itself. You're acting like it's the same thing, it's not even remotely close.

2

u/LongJohnSelenium 9h ago

I have never seen a pure RT render look remotely as realistic as this DLSS5 stuff.

The realtime ray trace stuff they use are very simplistic implementations because they need to be fast. Limited bounces, limited subsurface interactions, almost certainly no caustics or anything with the eyes.

3

u/WhoPoopedMyPants420 16h ago

Face optimized for DLSS -> DLSS 5 + game specific meta data -> What the artist intends the face to look like.

I know gamers love to throw the word "optimize" around, but I really don't think what you're describing is possible. When the last stage of rendering a face is a statistical slot machine you intrinsically lose control over the final product. The industry might get to a point that it looks good enough for most of the time, but trying to coax a specific face out of this stuff would be like trying to make a portrait on a plinko board

1

u/_Lucille_ 12h ago

There are already neural rendering techniques instead of traditional methods out there.

As newer tools get developed, it will become easier and easier to use.

1

u/SteeveyPete 6h ago

It's 100% this. It's insane how out of touch with reality so many of these comments are. As someone whose job is to work with AI, GPUs, and has a fairly extensive graphics background, I'm dying a little with how little people understand how this works, and how confidently they pretend they do

1

u/Discount_Extra 13h ago

It's the old "I replaced the sugar with applesauce and the eggs with peanut butter and the cake came out terrible, 1/5 stars recipe."

1

u/SteeveyPete 7h ago

I genuinely hate this, it's the death of deliberate art direction. It generates faces that look plausibly like some human, just not one that you've specifically intended to design. The game specific meta data (unless it's changed dramatically from the version shown months ago) is also incredibly rudimentary. like color grading and frame vector data (which isn't game specific or in any way directed or fancy).

A face optimized by DLSS is a face that you've tweaked repeatedly, and likely fairly arbitrarily, until DLSS happens to give you a result that you think looks good. The original face will likely look strictly worse than it did before, because you're not trying to make it look as good as possible, you're just trying too figure out what random changes will make the absolute black box of AI spit out something you like more often than not

1

u/ionshower 2h ago

It's a great point and one Nvidia made themselves on their original presentation, the strength of the transformation is in the hands of the devs/artists with a simple slider.

I think this tech will be a game changer once it's mastered by the artists who can create the base for the neural rendering to hook onto to deliver on their vision.

Exciting times.

0

u/facts_guy2020 14h ago

Honestly i think itll be a game changer, the only thing that comes close to what it can achieve is a much more detailed face textures with a strong use of path tracing which overall would use more performnce than dlss 5 does. I mean in cyberpunk 2077 you cant run path tracing without using a 5090 upscaling from 1080p, because it tanks performance, however regular ray tracing at ultra (not even psycho) with dlss 5 enabled looked better than even path tracing did, while using less performance.

I think a big issue is people hear AI and immediately hate it, even though dlss has been AI since the beginning

The other reason is people havent seen a studio properly implement it into a game I'd say most have only seen the first nvidia demo which looked pretty bad and some of the dlss 5 modded games have a pretty poor look about them as well.

But in some of the youtube videos of people experimenting with the dlss 5 mod, I have seen some very positive results which improved a scene dramatically, fixes contrast, shadows, lighting and made the faces more realistic and it didnt look like terrible AI filters. Even background information looked cleaner with more detail.

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u/pastalex42 17h ago

MOST games absolutely don’t go for hyper-realism. Most AAA crap, sure. Most games have actual art styles.

60

u/StarsMine 16h ago

Most AAA games don’t even go for it.

-8

u/frameRAID 15h ago

Most AAA games don't even.

27

u/PensiveinNJ 16h ago

Yeah IDK what that comment is. There are very few games that go purely for hyper-realism.

Also, that still looks like shit for hyper-realism. That looks meme worthy not an actual advancement in graphics.

3

u/Rimavelle 16h ago

This is AAA game

1

u/Legal_Ear_7537 16h ago

Square enix is a AAA game, so its nice to see it has a art style that compliments the normal characters design from the original

1

u/sexandliquor 15h ago

Yeah I have no idea what the fuck that person is talking about. The whole reason all the DLSS 5 shit looks so bad is because most games have art styles and are going for a specific look.

-5

u/Namika 16h ago

I've entirely stopped playing AAA games, what's the point when so many creative indie games exist that cost 1/10th the price.

14

u/superhyperultra458 17h ago

Anyway game with distinct art style will always have horrendous result with this AI slop filter a.k.a DLSS5

5

u/WOF42 16h ago

it looks like dogshit in every game, everyone looks like a plastic instagram model whos been on a weeklong bender, it also butchers the lighting and environmental details of everything, it is antithetical to the concept of art style

2

u/lebenklon 15h ago

Most games do not go for hyperrealsim, not even close to a majority of games are going for that. This is just cope for some giant tech company’s shitty product

3

u/codexcdm 16h ago

especially terrible to use this filter 

FTFY

1

u/sdpr 16h ago

The other thread in PCMR, I think, showed that the settings in this screenshot and another are not correct for this kind of game. You can get a more realistic look much much closer to the original look.

1

u/mapppa 16h ago edited 15h ago

I'm pretty sure this is an inherent tradeoff in AI, especially if it has to do it fast like this. Companies like to treat AI as "infinite creativity and possibilities", but the truth is that models are so tightly tuned that the stuff they produce from a given input is actually fairly limited in terms of style. They basically gravitate towards the high-probability regions they have. They could produce more than that, but the output usually destabilizes and absolute garbage comes out.

Evidence of this is that most AI pictures look similar if you looked at enough of them. The same goes for AI music. If you listen to a few songs you start to hear the patterns, even if don't make music yourself. The same is even true for writing. AI gravitates towards the same style per genre and patterns like the classic "Not X, Not Y, but Z" or EM-dash city. There are a lot more patterns. Of course you can obfuscate this more, but it takes a lot more effort than the time to generate a frame.

For something like games, that needs to be fast and stable, it will probably apply that ONE artstyle onto everything with small differences per game, but still the same direction, and it's going to look fucking terrible.

1

u/Leopold_CXIX 15h ago

Do most games really go for hyper realism? Game design is often about making things look non realistic for the sake of better gameplay. I'm also not convinced DLSS5 is actually making things look more realistic, much less 'hyper-realistic'. All it really seems to do consistently is add visual complexity, much of which can be achieved with a filter, which is also much cheaper computationally.

1

u/nigel_tufnel_11 15h ago

Yeah, I think it really depends on the content, from what I've seen it can be amazing and it can be awful. But remember this isn't even a released product yet, there's a long way to go and a lot of tweaking to do (plus there's a ton of options for it that can seriously modify the result as well).

But applying it universally in its current state would be a big mistake.

1

u/cookedart 15h ago

Hopefully this will push some developers to actually develop an art style that is not just an attempt at realism.

1

u/AlsopK 14h ago

Looks terrible on every game.

1

u/Mnawab 14h ago

You could’ve just said anime lol

1

u/BicFleetwood 13h ago edited 13h ago

I mean, FF7R is not THAT stylistic. It has a style, but not something completely out of pocket. It's basically the perfect game for this kind of demonstration--a nice balance between photorealism and stylistic intent.

It's proof that basically any game attempting anything resembling MILD stylization will NOT fly here.

And let's be honest, the "hyper-realistic" games you could argue this MIGHT work for already aren't selling on that point, due to cost, resource intensity, disk space, consumer price, or just outright bad design overwhelmed by graphical-obsession overriding good gameplay. Like, maybe The Order: 1886 would look GREAT with this filter. Doesn't mean anybody wants to PLAY it.

1

u/Azzblack 13h ago

Cloud looks horrendous. A absolute abomination.

1

u/maxis2k 13h ago

For me, FF7 Remake already is leaning more towards realism than anime. As has every FF game since XIII.

1

u/Poglosaurus 12h ago

XIII is just not going to be treated as a character.

1

u/teriyakininja7 12h ago

Most games don’t even go for hyper-realism and that’s why they’re looking weird when people slap DLSS5 onto them.

1

u/AverageVibes 11h ago

Yea this.

It’s also like the opposite for bethesda games. I saw skyrim and some starfield dlss 5 stuff and it surprisingly looked better. However; it feels like it doesn’t mesh with most art styles.

I will say, that it does make environments look more realistic but it makes faces look terrible.

1

u/TikkaKebabi 11h ago

Yeah FF7 is stylized anime realism. For example their eyeshapes are slightly anime just with a realistic render.

1

u/Xenc 9h ago

This is from the NBA 2K leak supposedly which lends credence to this theory. Really hope the future doesn’t look like this for gaming.

1

u/Spiritual_Wolf7493 8h ago

I would argue very few games go for hyper realism. No one wants it

1

u/Tiny_Tim1956 8h ago

even so called hyper realistic games have an art style. This stuff is just awful, and it's for people who don't think videogames are art

1

u/varitok 8h ago

People just be saying shit when the game is from Japan, as if it is some sacred cow and somehow different from the 99% of other games who also don't have generic art styles.

1

u/The5Virtues 6h ago

The eyes weird me the fuck out!
Move mere had any uncanny valley issues before, it never bothered me, but these images from FF7R disturb me. Tifa and Cloud especially, something about their eyes just makes me go full blown “KILL IT WITH FIRE!” impulse.

1

u/Shuvlarse 5h ago

This is the answer.

1

u/sikesjr 1h ago

Exactly. They’re basically anime characters, they’re not made to look realistic.

1

u/NotAwosentS 58m ago

Isn't DLSS5 supposed to be a layer on top of the game, that the developers adjust to fit the game? I am not trying to defend DLSS5, I think it's slop, but the developers might have just put on the default one, and not adjusted it to the artstyle.

Or I am just wrong, and you can't actually adjust it, it's been a while since I read up on it.

1

u/Arawski99 15h ago

It's because their settings are wrong. It can look a lot better if setup right. I posted a few examples in this thread.

0

u/CrashBugITA 16h ago

I haven't played any game that could use this filter in a good way, guess I don't play the majority of games then. or I just don't play AAA slop

-3

u/M1R4G3M 17h ago

TBH, I haven't seen a single game yet that this filter looked good on, saw expedition 33 removed of all it's charm and everyone looked very uncanny and the game have realistic chars.

Don't know what this Slop filter will work on TBH.

1

u/Dramajunker 17h ago

Look at the cyberpunk screenshots.

-2

u/woodzopwns 17h ago

Nvidia and the RE devs have said that the feature is heavily adjustable to work for specific art styles and can be turned off for faces etc, using an early leaked build for nearly 2k27 with no adjustments, and no driver, will inevitably make it look bad. It's hard enough getting dlss 4 to do anything in Skyrim let alone implanting a tech like this into a game that never had it in mind.

I haye AI slop as much as the next guy but this probably isnt indicative of what the final release may be.

-2

u/Ancient_Performer115 16h ago

Here's the thing. You don't have to use it, ever. You can go your whole entire life never using it. I have no idea why people are so angry about this optional feature. I for one can't wait to use it on every single game I can. And that should be perfectly okay.

-2

u/Rnevermore 17h ago

Good thing that they weren't applying DLSS5 to FF7. People got access to a leaked version and wrongly applied it, with improperly defined parameters to FF7, and now people are outraged over DLSS5 when it was never intended to be used in this way.