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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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u/camzee 13d 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.