DLSS 5 preview

[Tinek]

So basically photo realism has taken one step closer to being a real thing and people are critical?

You can say Instagram photos made in a studio are "realism" but things and people do not look like that IRL. At all. That's not realism, that's artificial beautification in most cases. In the RE comparison, you can see PT lighting - the actual, calculated "realism simulation" of light that people all over loved to praise as the best thing since the sliced bread in games. And then AI filter on top which does NOT match the simulation of realism - shadows, light etc. are just very different. And then you call that realism?

 

[Tinek]

Quote from Nvidia -

"Developers have detailed control over DLSS 5's effects to ensure they maintain the aesthetic. This includes intensity, color grading and masking."

Those are pathetic amount of control though - developers do not control, AT ALL, what the AI model is actually doing, or NVIDIA would be talking about it. Devs can only, as shown so far, adjust postprocessing of it (colours etc.). That is not "detailed control", that's a band aid and marketing BS in my book.

 

[opethdisciple]

You can say Instagram photos made in a studio are "realism" but things and people do not look like that IRL. At all. That's not realism, that's artificial beautification in most cases. In the RE comparison, you can see PT lighting - the actual, calculated "realism simulation" of light that people all over loved to praise as the best thing since the sliced bread in games. And then AI filter on top which does NOT match the simulation of realism - shadows, light etc. are just very different. And then you call that realism?

I said it's a step towards photo realism.

 

[Tinek]

What's amazing to you? The fact that when something better and more realistic comes along, people prefer it?

"Instagram-style heavily post-processed photos are realism!" - did you really go there? Amazing indeed.

Isn't that a little bit of a redundent and meaningless comment?

"If you don't agree with my opinion, you should stfu!" - it reads to me. Maybe next time read something few times before posting?

Real-time Path tracing is a technique used to achieve a more realistic light simulation than previous real-time techniques. From the looks of DLSS 5, layering this technology on top makes it more realistic still.

No, it doesn't. AI hallucinations =/= realism. Instagram-style heavy postprocessed photos =/= realism. Light hallucinated by AI that doesn't match actually simulated by PT lighting =/= realism. It's fake beautification.

Which is how progress works.

making things worse is also progress. Just not the one anyone wanted.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I would never go back to gaming in the 80s and 90s. I was just chatting to my mate whilst playing Ark Raiders last night, both of nearly 50 and so pleased we didn't give it up as a hobby, great time to be alive tech wise

Yup. I'm 42 and if you'd shown me DLSS 5 Grace from RE9 when I was a kid first getting into PCs and gaming, playing with 2D & 3D accelerators, and early voodoo cards and such, you'd say that's basically photo realistic, hands down. And AI slop might be an insult for some, but in the 3D gaming space, the fact you can get to basically AI quality levels of generated images in real time, that's kinda insane.

After spending a lot of time with it today, I've basically seen most of the discussion and arguments. There's a massive amount of people who just hate AI in general and want to dunk on it any chance you get. You look at what they're tweeting and it's things like "I hope Nvidia burns and all the employees and their families are destitute" and then you look at the profile of those people, and they're some causy anti-AI person.

Lots of people trying to dunk that games are art and it ruins artists intentions, despite their fave ones for RE9 actually endorsing the tech. I think Grace getting a makeover is just genuinely upsetting to people, I'm ngl. Nvidia of course worked closely with all these devs to get this to work in reality. But these people have no idea what the "original intentions" of the devs were. Well as close to realism as they could get presumably, the original final product was them getting as close as they can. But if you read the statements by the devs, they basically endorse technology to make their game better.

I genuinely think that most people think its a snapchat filter that a woman would use to be more attractive. Accusing Nvidia of putting on lipstick etc.

This whole thing is blown out of proportion IMO. It's like chill, there's no need to be unhinged about an option. Let them cook for a bit, let devs have time to tweak their DLSS 5 settings/profile. Let's wait for final numbers of render time and whatnot. There's no need to be as unhinged as everyone is being.

Looks like release timing probably means this will run on 5080 cards, so I'm pretty excited to see what they do

 

[Calin Banc]

You're right it's not that I'd prefer to have only 80s and 90s games available - I think it's actually that I'd rather go back and live in the 90s. Again probably just a case of rose tinted glasses, but every game back then felt largely new.


It may not remove it, but it certainly devalues it with the endless stream of remasters, remakes and generally derivative nonsense


There's no limits being pushed with this though. A new "feature" gets rolled out, we get a couple of tech demos, and then it's forgotten about when the next feature is pushed out with next week's new hardware.

In the past we had longer product cycles (particularly in the console space), so by the end of a "generation" you'd get the best looking games and best performing games as developers optimised every inch for the hardware they had. New generations of hardware generally brought new types of games - mechanics that were now possible with more performance, or new types of hardware.



Not sure why you need good artists, when whatever they've painstakingly created is overpainted with AI filters


Because most of those weren't gimmicks. Moving from sprites to polygons allowed games that weren't previously possible (or certainly not in a convincing or performant way), programmable shaders allowed a huge step forward in realism and again effects that weren't otherwise possible or practical.

The others mentioned are all something of a nothing burger - even the much vaunted Ray Tracing has what a handful of games that really make extensive use of it, and afaik none where light being more accurate has added new game play mechanics.


If the DLSS5 screen shots are your idea of far more convincing, then I'll take the older algorithms that are less convincing due to their limitations any day

It's easier to have "everything new" when the gaming industry is basically at the beginning (3D era). You can experiment and play around. I'd say this is true for most endeavors. Plus, gamers were different back then, gameplay didn't have to be dumb down and simple, "cinematic". Everything comes into play.

Moreover, people now complain on how expensive hardware is, upgrading once 4 years or so (even more if you're not that much into it)... back in the "good ol' times", tech moved a lot faster. There was no way you'd play at high resolutions, 60fps 4 years later... or maybe even manage to play at all.

 

[Tinek]

My main question is what will the frame render time impact be, it's not changing assets, it's layering on top of existing assets, so there has to be a render time implication as a result of this for things in the render output chain to be in sync. The average latency is 33ms when factoring in modern tech used like FG, PT etc. The Nvidia demo shown by DF showed them using a controller, which is the go-to method to use when you don't want to feel the increased latency introduced by slower rendering pipeline hence why consoles feel fine even at 30fps.

This is another thing indeed. Demo run on 2x5090, but then NVIDIA claimed it will be optimised and run better, but they added qualifier that it will depend on resolution and other settings. It could as well run "great" in... 720p, with upscaling. Plus FG is apparently enforced to be turned on by it as well. Considering AI was supposed to accelerate frames by saving resources normally used by PT... this doesn't sound stellar, does it? I'll judge when it's released but I reckon 5k series won't be fast enough to run it well in games in proper res and FPS. It sounds more like a feature they will release now but really push forth with 6k series and newer, in the future, which likely will have even more tensor cores for more AI stuff, slowly replacing standard CUDA cores etc. potentially.

 

[Devious]

I'm expecting the red team will be announcing a competing AMD RedSlop update coming very soon (Probably 2030)

 

[Calin Banc]

From what I've gathered, DLSS 5 has developer settings available. Resident Evil characters are the way Capcom made them and intended them to be. That's a creative decision, not generative.

Then the "lighting", I'm wonder how much is real, as in following the path of light (like path tracing / ray tracing) and how much is more for show - a sort of rasterization made artificially pretty (like you do when you post process an image, adding light and masking it where it wasn't to begin with).

Not the least, high quality assets we already had in games for those "in games shots" (trailers and such), but... they're not available in-game due to (my guess), performance issues on weaker hardware. How on earth someone will give it the OK then to have a feature that needs hardware more than path tracing itself? ...

Well, I guess we'll wait and see.

 

[welshrat]

I'm expecting the red team will be announcing a competing AMD RedSlop update coming very soon (Probably 2030)

I own a 9070xt and I'm extremely excited by all this, as a full stack software developer of over 25 years ai is incredible, it allows me to be twice maybe 3 times as productive when context switching between projects and languages. Yes you have to feed it the right stuff and understand the output but wow if you do. Unit tests which I hate writing can now be 80% all ai. People really need to grasp how transformative this tech is.

 

[Tinek]

At the beginning people where ripping that to pieces for being blurry. Now it's better than native rendering!

Only if you consider horrible implementation of TAA (like in UE) and general UE-induced rendering method as "native". Then yes, it's better than those abominations. But those are cost-cutting choices by big publishers which didn't have to happen at all, as way better methods exist already, not causing such issues. Again, in a way NVIDIA created a problem (TAA and bad implementations of it) and then created solution for it. Brilliant long-term thinking. Then they created another problem in the form of RT/PT killing FPS and now we have again solution they created for it. Each time they grab a big chunk of a market by forcing the whole industry to do exactly as they tell them. And people still praise them for it. Amazing marketing by that corpo, hat off.

 

[lovelyhead]

So many people getting their knickers in a twist about DLSS 5. Just dont use it if you dont like it. There are way more important things to be worried about rather than fretting about an artists intentions being ruined by some software. I think it looks great.

 

[Tinek]

I said it's a step towards photo realism.

To me it looks more like a ton of "beautiful" mods one can download for many games. I stay away from those, most just look absolutely fake and unrealistic, because I actually go out and look at people and none of them look like that in reality.

 

[Ayahuasca]

So many people getting their knickers in a twist about DLSS 5. Just dont use it if you dont like it. There are way more important things to be worried about rather than fretting about an artists intentions being ruined by some software. I think it looks great.

Indeed, someone appears to be having a spectacular meltdown over this.

 

[Dicehunter]

So many people getting their knickers in a twist about DLSS 5. Just dont use it if you dont like it. There are way more important things to be worried about rather than fretting about an artists intentions being ruined by some software. I think it looks great.

The NPC's must follow their programming, They were told to have full on mental breakdowns and send Nvidia devs death threats so until the program is changed, Psychopathy shall continue.

 

[Tinek]

Then the "lighting", I'm wonder how much is real, as in following the path of light (like path tracing / ray tracing) and how much is more for show - a sort of rasterization made artificially pretty (like you do when you post process an image, adding light and masking it where it wasn't to begin with).

None is real, this AI model is probabilistically "imagining" how light would look like in a scene like that, basing it on the training material of various lit scenes they fed it with initially. And that shows, it looks different than actual PT does (ergo, actually calculated light propagation in the scene). That model is supposed to consider light sources, motion vectors etc. to "imagine" the final result, but it's not calculating any light propagation. If it's anything (and most likely it is) like the actual image or video generator, each time you play the game you will likely see a bit different lighting in the scene, faces might change slightly as well (which is already visible in their demo, as the AI model still loses temporal coherence now and then).

Not the least, high quality assets we already had in games for those "in games shots" (trailers and such), but... they're not available in-game due to (my guess), performance issues on weaker hardware.

Mostly because of vRAM restrictions - you can thank NVIDIA for that.

How on earth someone will give it the OK then to have a feature that needs hardware more than path tracing itself? ...

It was supposed to remove the need for RT/PT and replace it all together, and by that lower hardware requirements... by requiring loads of tensor cores and vRAM instead.

 

[Tinek]

So many people getting their knickers in a twist about DLSS 5. Just dont use it if you dont like it.

Till it's mandatory like upscaling and even FG became over time?

 

[Calin Banc]

Mostly because of vRAM restrictions - you can thank NVIDIA for that.

It's not new, but still, vRAM alone is not the problem. Let's take Stalker 2, in the cutscene, the FPS is hit due to the higher quality assets, lighting, etc., but still fits nicely into the vRAM (one of the pluses from UE). Once gameplay starts, you see lower models even though the best/EPIC settings are ON - but actually feels like medium settings in comparisson.

 

[Calin Banc]

Till it's mandatory like upscaling and even FG became over time?

Those are different things - they improve performance, while DLSS 5 takes it away.

 

[Tinek]

It's not new, but still, vRAM alone is not the problem. Let's take Stalker 2, in the cutscene, the FPS is hit due to the higher quality assets, lighting, etc., but still fits nicely into the vRAM (one of the pluses from UE). Once gameplay starts, you see lower models even though the best/EPIC settings are ON - but actually feels like medium settings in comparisson.

Lighting isn't assets though. Textures are primary vRAM eater. Higher polygons not as expensive by themselves performance-wise anymore, though they will eat vRAM too. Interaction of light etc. with higher poly models is a bit more problematic - but that's why they invented tesselation.