Important details from a post-demo writeup:

During the demo, the DLSS research talked through the level of granularity available. Developers don’t just get an on/off switch. They get intensity controls that can be dialed anywhere, not just full strength. They get spatial masking, so they can set the water enhancement to 100%, wood to 30%, characters to 120%, all independently within the same scene. They get color grading controls for blending, contrast, saturation, and gamma. All of this runs through the existing SDK, which means studios already using DLSS and Reflex have a familiar pipeline to work with.

The demo showing the tech running at 100% is not going to look the same as full games built with it over the next year before release.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the only thing it’s changing is the lighting effects. The models aren’t changing at all (even when this looks hard to believe).

Yes, at full strength the effect at times looks pretty bad (anyone remember when devs could suddenly use bloom effects and entire games looked like Vaseline was smeared across the screen?). But it’s not going to be flipped on at 100% across the board for most games.

My guess looking at the demos so far is that a lot of material lighting like stone, metal, etc will have it at higher strengths and characters, particularly faces/skin, will have it considerably lower (the key place where it’s especially uncanny valley).

The demo showing the tech running at 100% is not going to look the same as full games built with it over the next year before release.

Yes we know. The games will look worse prior to DLSS because “why bother? The slop will fix it” and then worse after.

Eventually maybe, but I really doubt devs are going to build their entire game in an unfinished way for the less than 1% of their audience that is going to have one of the cards that can run this.

PS5, Xbox, and all PC gamers not dropping $1k on a new rig this fall are still going to be playing the games without this.

In 3 years, sure, maybe the PS6 has similar features on AMD by then and the market share for cards running real time ML adjustments to scenes has widened enough devs can depend on the tech.

But it’s a bit premature to throw a fit about the likelihood of devs cutting corners because of a feature only accessible to the most expensive setups owned by a fraction of their target audience.

Have you seen Borderlands 4? They went full “use frame gen if you want 60fps”.

Devs might not want it, but CEOs sees they can cut corners and brag on using the new shiny toys and despite Dev’s warnings they will use it.