Snow Crash is satire. Zuck didn’t get the joke.
The 1980s view of cyberspace was disembodied techno-warlocks soaring through floating numbers to avoid getting their brains melted by anti-intrusion software. Neal Stephenson turned that into a mall.
Second Life also built that torment nexus, but just the 3D rendered MUSH part. They parted out infinite virtual space into a cramped trailer park waaay before Decentraland’s cocaine fantasy version. SL’s users were like half trans furries and half the most basic bitch dolled-up human avatars, who on reflection probably had even worse body-image issues than the trans furries. This is all to say that the average user was horny in a way that the modern web cannot reflect. I don’t know if VR Chat properly captured that, but I’m certain Horizon Worlds fucked it up, because avatars don’t exist below the waist.
Well. Didn’t.
If a fan released this as a shader injector, I think it would be celebrated.
Nvidia pushing it under their brand for upscaling is fuck-right-off territory.
If they’d talked to… anyone, beforehand, they’d know RE9’s graphics don’t need help. Show us how this affects unmodded Skyrim. Show us LA Noire actually looking like all the actors it stars. Real-time style transfer surely works the other way too; show us Doom Eternal as a cartoon. Make it a silly thing users can do, rather than yet another bullshit feature to bribe into new games and lord over AMD. Were the anti-competitive margins from CUDA not comfortable enough?
Plenty of games pursue photorealism - they just don’t brag about it like Kojima. I’d count every game that got as close as technology allowed, then changed just enough to dodge the uncanny valley. Halo Infinite is stylized; the original game is just old. LA Noire advertised its verisimilitude and now looks like any other seventh-gen title. People have been going “holy shit, it’s so real!” since, like, Night Driver.
The good ending from here is the end of that arms race.
Half the push for ballooning budgets and decade-long dev cycles has been escalating standards for what feels real-ish. RDR2 cost half a billion dollars and shipped with fifty gigabytes of visual assets. It already feels only as pretty as modded GTA V. But a filter like this presumably works fine on RDR… 1. A game that cost a lot less, took a fraction as long to come out, and desperately lacks several graphical features we now take for granted. If your graphical style is “like realism, but” then you can now jump straight into the uncanny valley from models someone banged out on a Friday afternoon.
In other words, 2027 kinda graphics, with 2007 kinda budgets.
What’s more likely to happen is that behemoth publishers will hire even more people to do everything the hard way, and then also fight this instant realism filter, so it only looks the way it already looked when they did things the hard way. Because nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.
The Elder Scrolls would be interesting if it was touching up Morrowind graphics. Like instead of a remaster, they did a minimum-effort re-release based on OpenMW, but included official text-to-speech and style-transfer models. Bind a toggle key so you can activate CHIM mode and see the generic imperial male face beneath the actor telling you a little story.
Admittedly the dice-roll combat would be even sillier as fake live action. A playable version of those Oblivion skits.
I should say: a game hallucinating detail like this would be sick. Spend a hot nanosecond rendering some PS3-quality animation with PS2-quality graphics, shunt that into a very weird shader, get high photorealism that maybe doesn’t look the same if you turn around and look back. Probably with diegetic framing, like being in a dream. A shooter where you’re fighting your way out of a coma. Use all that GPU grunt to make a tinny saxophone soundtrack as you play.
But when you’re just bumping the resolution? Fuck off.
