inclementimmigrantNvidia's DLSS 5 Is a Slap in the Face to the Art of Video Game Design
1984Being young today must be fun. Just missed out on all the good stuff in the 80, 90s and 2000s to experience this mess we have now.
Joanie ParkerI was hanging out with my neighbour a few months back. When I listed off how fucked kids today are…
Then I remembered he has two young boys and they’re growing up with this dystopia as their present and future.
I apologised once I realized his family is directly affected.
He said “Oh I already know they’re fucked.”
I don’t see how this will stay consistent enough for art directors to sign off on it. It’s effectively just a hallucination based on your current video game frame.
NONEPersonally, I don’t know much about this technology. That said, I’ve heard that the original purpose of DLSS was to improve gaming performance, give you more FPS, and so on.
In that sense, many—myself included—are wondering: How is this slop generator going to improve game performance? How is giving Grace from RE9 a totally different face with make up on going to improve my gaming experience?
DraconicSaladIt makes “I fixed this ugly FEMALE character” chuds happy and that’s what matters to them.
zewmI think the idea is that you could use low resolution / detail models that take up less RAM and are faster to process and DLSS hallucinates a high res image.
All of this upscaling when it was presented over a decade ago was to give older cards a longer lease in life and now it’s morphed into the mandatory way to get a stable framerate since developers can now just rely on DLSS and to a lesser extent FSR to get them to a acceptable framerate instead of optimization.
If this could be applied to games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, System Shock 2, Soldier of Fortune, Medal of Honour, Tron 2.0, Call of Duty and all other titles from that era, I would not mind in the slightest.
A man can dream…
Well the last time that was done we ended up with the GTA trilogy mess with AI upscaling/remastering.
I did not mean that crap of course!
But if technology existed that would enhance graphics of old games to look like stuff from 2016 or so that would be pretty neat. I would definitely use it!
But that won’t happen I guess…
And there’s still people who think this is a good thing and an evolution in graphics. You can guess what their political alignments are pretty quickly.
BJWThe guess would be entirely wrong, of course, but I can sense that has never stopped you before.
If you don’t think gen AI is a fascist technology and praise it then i’m fairly certain that putting you in the fascist box is correct.
Lol. I am as far from fascist as one can get. Based on your answer, I don’t believe you even know what fascism is.
If you knew what it was you’d understand that gen AI is such thing. It steals the intellectual power of others to create dumbed down slop with the goal of making the general public less educated and reliant on it. It’s a trap made by technofascist billionaires to keep the masses from taking all of their heads, and this administration just happens to be all in on that too, using it for surveillance to disappear minorities and political opponents.
I disagree with multiple assertions you’ve made. It doesn’t steal anything. Neither does it have a goal. People using it may steal, and those with the most successful products may have goals - but that’s not the technology. This is like saying guns are fascist. Or cars are fascist. Or phones are fascist.
It’s a tool, and like any tool, the motive and ethics of it’s use is directly attributable to the user, not the tool.
The motive and ethics are from the tech companies that created them. Those are the ones with technofascist aspirations.
Some, yes, not all. No one company created the technology. You can’t use a blanket accusation to condemn all forms of machine learning just because Altman (OpenAI), Zuckerberg (Meta) and Elon Musk are obvious fascists, and they’re championing the technology. Call them out specifically, it’s more effective than “all AI bad.”
I’m specifically talking about LLMs and generative AI. Those are NOT the same as machine learning because they don’t learn anything, they’re text predictive algorithms that were given infinite amounts of resources.
And? They’re still tools. They exist. They can be used for things other than fascism. Just today I used an LLM to determine the area of a plot of land from a satellite photograph. I used generative AI to create a phone wallpaper background that matched my phone case.
Did the fascists gain power over me?
Do you think it have been better if I spent my time manually measuring the area, determining the math, and calculating the area of land? Should I have made an inferior version of the wallpaper manually?
If you think so, you must have more time and creative talent than me. Enjoy your privilege, but don’t shame those without.
I used an LLM to determine the area of a plot of land from a satellite photograph.
I don’t think that’s possible unless the LLM has access to the satellite to mile ratio. Likely an hallucination.
I used generative AI to create a phone wallpaper background that matched my phone case.
Stealing from artists 🙄
you must have more time and creative talent than me.
Art is not about talent, it’s about continuous, rigorous training and improvement over years. It’s not a privilege. You can literally pick up a pencil and some paper and draw right now. It’s not something that is somehow inaccessible, hell I’ve seen a furry artist draw an anthro dragoness pin up with nothing but a burning stick and a rock. Also, there’s people out there that are completely paralyzed that can paint with their mouths. There’s millions of pictures in the internet that you could find to match your phone case that weren’t made with a plagiarism machine.
I don’t think that’s possible unless the LLM has access to the satellite to mile ratio. Likely an hallucination.
It did. The screenshot was from Google Maps which had the scale in the corner. I tried searching for a Google Maps plugin that offered the same functionality, but I couldn’t find any that would let me free form draw a shape on the map. So I took a screenshot, drew a red shape, and gave it to Gemini. It showed me all the steps it was going through, the math looked legit and seemed realistic to me.
Stealing from artists 🙄
How is it stealing from an artist? No artist created it. This is even less like stealing than downloading pirated films. In both cases, no one lost anything. Are you arguing that had I not had access to generative AI that I would have sought out and paid someone to craft a wallpaper for me? I would not have. I’d just use some free art online. Where is the theft? Are you saying someone, somewhere already created my exact wallpaper? Shall I upload it, and you can tell me where it already exists and I could have purchased it?
Art is not about talent, it’s about continuous, rigorous training and improvement over years.
Yes, time. I don’t have those years. I spent my years studying machine learning instead.
Easy to avoid nvidia products these days anyway. Overpriced, marginal performance over AMD, and tied to AI slop globally. Never been so easy to vote with your wallet.
That would only work i they still gave a shit about gamers or the consumer market in general. They became a full AI Datacenter company, thats where they make the money. I don’t think they will even produce consumer graphics cards in 5 years anymore.
To be honest it looks great and at first I thought about how impressive it is.
Then you think about how it modifies what was created and how it could lack consistency with a character looking a certain way in a part of the game and differently later.
I don’t know know what to think about these technologies like FSR and DLSS…
I don’t think I mind the fake frames as it could give you more performance on something like a Steam Deck, but the rest is tricky…
The magic here is you always have the option in most game settings, to turn it off.
I dislike upscaling, it always looks off to me and frequently causes edges of things to be weird kind of like aliasong but different. After upgrading from a gtx 3060, where I only used it for a few games that were hectic enough to not notice it as much, to a 9070xt I turned off upscaling globally and run everything in the native resolution. Games look so much better without dlss or fsr to me, fewer weird artifacts causing distractions.
I’ll take 20 less fps to not constsntly feel like something is off even if I can’t point out exactly what it is.
The problem is that these ‘features’ give you the fake appearance of performance but at the cost of actual performance. And they aren’t even good in the first place. Upscaling is like smearing vaseline all over your screen and saying “see how good it looks” when it’s just a blurry mess, especially with temporal elements. Frame generation gives artificial smoothness but doesn’t help input latency which is the part of frame rate that actually matters.
The kicker is that it costs real frames to generate fake ones. The game ends up looking and feeling worse.
HerrVorragendI am not completely against this technology if it can be used to ‘remaster’ older games.
In the current climate of rising hardware prices, it just seems unnecessary and tone-deaf to introduce such tech that requires not one, but TWO top of the line GPUs to run.
Yes, Nvidia is hugely into AI and machine learning, but they might be known as slopvidia soon if the keep forcing this stuff on gamers.
knightly the SneptaurIt can’t, remastering games is an entirely different process that requires artistic direction. Piping a game’s video output through an AI filter just takes the original game and smears a bunch of slop over it.
I find it interesting that the AI parts of the video have very little video in them. They have the original game moving along, and then they show the AI version and mostly keep it as a still. I suspect that they did this so that you can’t do a side-by-side comparison and see that the AI version doesn’t actually play as well as the original version.
Also, I’ve got to wonder about how it must feel to be an artist who worked on one of these games, and watch the thing you carefully hand-tuned to match the artistic vision of the game design be replaced by the mindless addition of wrinkles.
It’s crazy to watch these developers march everyone’s jobs, including their own off a cliff.
I don’t think developers and artists have a choice when they’re being told by the publishers to do it.
Double Latency Slop Slinger
Debt Limited Stereotype Sketcher
Detail Leaking Shabby Seer
KneeTittsThe upside of enshitification in newer games and crap like this is that i am less interested in playing the new stuff and the more so enjoy replaying older games.
Which also run at peak performance.
glitzer_gadzeThis article speaks to my heart
Never cared for realism in games to begin with, so don’t particularly care to comment on how it looks, but I’ve been thinking that I genuinely find it creepy.
Not just Uncanny Valley material, but also having these faces stare at you, always fully lit, it just gives me the creeps, kind of like a panopticon situation.
I don’t fucking know, if that’s my own trauma playing into that, where for the longest time, people looking at me generally meant they’re about to bully me.
But either way, I’m about to head to bed and genuinely feel like there’s a 20% chance I’ll have a mild nightmare from that shit.
This whole AI craze has been a wild ride of all kinds of nightmare fuel, from depictions with missing/additional limbs to the weirdest warping of objects+limbs in those fucking generated videos. And the worst part is that some folks seem to just not see it or not want to see it, so they keep using the nightmare generators.
I guess by this description that perhaps it would be good for something like resident evil that strives to give you that uncanny creepiness no?
Aren’t video games Art? Why does nvidia think it knows better than the artists? . And maybe I am the only one, but DLSS has never made any of my games look better ever. It’s always looked worse, and I now permanently turn that shit off and regret spending a 20 percent higher price for something I don’t use. I don’t usually agree with IGN articles, but this one hits it on the head.
I think Jenson said during a presentation a long time ago that a long term goal was to have graphics being entirely generated. This seems like a big step towards that.
orlyowlPersonally, I only care that it looks like a deepfake. And that alone is giving me the ick. Like I would pay more to have it NOT look like this.
As long as you pay more, I’m sure they’re happy either way!
fallaciousBasisWho gives a fuck? I can play you’re game “as intended” or my way. Mods make games awesome.
If someone wants to play with AI slop mode fully enabled, that’s their choice and their prerogative and I’m assuming they bought the game so how about they just enjoy it however the hell they want to.
Business folks calling the shots over the artists cut back their hours and insist they let the slop generator make up the difference.
Every corner that can be cut to make running the business cheaper does get cut, and this is a pretty big possibility of corners to cut. It’s worthwhile to adamantly express the market for quality work.