DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement

I would actually argue it does not. Frame generation requires a minimum of 45-60 FPS so with such a requirement it does not take a game from unplayable to playable. Additionally, those frames don't lead to the same experience as if the GPU had natively rendered the game because it does not account for the user input for those frames. It literally delays the next frame to insert a fake frame in between, leading to an increase in latency, so the only experience improvement is a smoothing of the rendering but it makes the visual quality worse and the latency worse. To me, this does not make sense and has been very wrongly advertised by nvidia with claims such as an 5070 = 4090, so so wrong.

Edit: frame generation is only appeasing the people for whom higher FPS = better, without looking at the real user experience such as frame pacing, latency, visual quality etc.

While I don't disagree that frame gen at high refresh rates does look pretty decent, I feel the need to correct the input latency part... In your 72fps example you actually have the latency of effectively 36fps because the GPU has to hold back a frame in order to have two frames to interpolate between. It doesn't (currently?) do extrapolation so this holding back a frame is a hard limit and applies pretty much equally from 2x frame gen all the way up to 6x. This isn't exactly catastrophic for single player or PVE multiplayer but I would steer clear in PVP

Nvidia reflex 2 should sorta kinda tackle this by taking the updated input => camera position and reprojecting the image before rendering but 1) this will require the game to support it (e.g. declaring UI, crosshairs etc to exclude) and 2) only serves to tackle the game feel portion of the problem - in pve you'll still be working with old pixels and your response times will still suffer accordingly.

Again, great tech but worth knowing the limits!

I’ve been interpolating movies and tv shows since 2015, so I think I was better able to set my expectations for the downsides of interpolation.

why????

I'm pretty sure its 1 real frame every X frames so 6x would be 1 real, 5 generated.

Exactly (we almost posted at the same time, where I explicitly talked about this in the other reply, lol, also with 10 fps as example. :D). There is a reason why Nvidia does not share the latency. I have no idea how this is legal.

Yes, pretty much. Each those diagrams and numbers Nvidia put on screenshots, look down at the bottom it says Multi Frame Gen 6x. It's small, most people would miss.

Edit: Removed explanation, it was a bit unnecessary complicated.

The game can pass movement vectors so they gen image can adapt.

I honestly blame AMD for consistently missing every opportunity to actually be competitive in the space. So much so that they've spawned a phrase. "AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity".

It's not hard for Nvidia to capture the market when AMD doesn't compete at all for anything other than the low end market except in a blue moon. Their name is synonymous with mid range at best cards. If you want high end you literally only have one choice and I say that as someone who owns a 7900 XTX. Even that card, which was designed to be competitive with the 4080, comes with a whole lot of compromises that make the card only competitive in pure raster performance, Linux compatibility, and literally nothing else.

You mentioned some of the technologies that Nvidia cards have. You're right that not everyone needs every feature but being on the other end of that spectrum also sucks. Not having compatible hardware encoders means you take a performance hit every time you screen share your game in discord. Not having CUDA means your card is basically ONLY good for video games (yes I know rocm exists but trying to use it is a frustrating experience compared to CUDA). Having Ray tracing performance that's so far behind the competition means you'll always be making a sacrifice in either quality or performance. Choosing AMD means consistently watching Nvidia create new technologies and waiting for AMD to reinvent them a generation later to lackluster support.

I will never get how Nvidia got THAT popular amongst gamers

It was the only gfx card maker back then that doesn't sucks, and the only real competitor is AMD and they kinda sucked. Games made back then are mostly optimised for nvidia. And then they have shadowplay which capture footage from x second/minute ago with a press of a button, which popularised sharing funny clips. AMD only get better like a few years ago, then Intel enter the race. Today Nvidia doesn't really offer much advantage for most people because of the price. If chinese gfx card maker catch up, Nvidia will probably have to fully pivot to AI company to survive.

I believe HairFX is Unity's version of AMD's TressFX, so not an Nvidia tech in this case.

that too, but I w as referring to enabling shittily coded games to run on midrange hardware

This is kinda weird since 4K monitors have no trouble drawing at 1080p and don't look worse than 1080 monitors doing so.

And I mean you bought the 4k monitor, so for it not to be a good choice for gaming needs to be addressed. Can't have that money go to waste. Not your fault you fell for the marketing again.

At least movies will look good on it.

The relationship between screen size and distance to viewer decides at what resolution you won't be able to notice more detail at a higher resolution. 4K on a desktop monitor can make the same amount of sense (or not) as on a TV (or phone, or any other device with a display really).

Which is bull, because we've been playing games from our couches for like 40 years and there were beautiful, amazing, wonderful graphics long before the 4k propaganda.

Ummmm 4k is way less important at couch distance compared to desk distance. Most of us don't have TVs that occupy the same field of view from the couch as a monitor does at the desk. For example I have a 32 inch monitor at my desk 1.5 feet away and a 65 inch TV about 10 feet away. Sure the TV has 4x the viewing area but my viewing distance is more than 4x so the picture is not as crisp.

Well, gonna be real gay when that transgender protagonist is now in a romantic scene with a dude.

Don't forget about making Cloud, a Japanese inspired character, look like Scarlett Johansson.

So it's closer to an ML shader than actual supersampling?

I think you're missing the point of the question here. DLSS was meant to "fake" performance, i.e. you could have the game run at an upscaled 4k, when your PC can't do native 4k. Now it's reducing the performance at those upscaled 4k again, so you could just run native 4k at the same FPS.

No, it was meant to offset the performance loss of raytracing in games. That is why it was introduced.

I think that "more fps" is important when there's things that move quickly compared to their size. My go-to game here is Batman: Arkham City - in the steel mill sections, there's a lot of "sparky" particle effects; in general, there's a lot of dust flying about. That stuff does look noticeably better at 90 fps than it does at 60 fps. My eyes can't really see the difference at 120 fps, but I can definitely hear the GPU fans, so locked to 90 is fine. Makes absolutely no difference to the gameplay at all, of course.

Games that are designed for 30 fps tend not to have the same kind of particle effects, mostly because they would look terrible. I do feel sorry for the graphics artists having their hands tied, rather than being able to fully express themselves, but all engineering is about weighing things up and finding the right compromise, of course.

Yassifying all of your games with a slop filter is the complete opposite of artistic expression, of course.

I always just play at locked 60 fps. It's a simple life.

Ehhhhh have you seen the numbers lately? People seem to be moving away from AAA titles more and more.

There aren't enough drugs in the world to get me to understand that show.

I enjoy playing games with my friends :c

But because it’s a post-processing shader that needs to analyze the entire image and work out materials on the fly to objects that have already been rendered, it murders the frame rate and can make mistakes on its guesses.

Yeah, this sounds dumb as fuck. They're rushing and making the worst choices possible to push big marketing ideas.

Same as anything AI: if they slow down and make sure everything is done by the book, it could really be a useful tool, but they're too high on power to care about any of this.

It's a brute force hack that adds tiny details no one will ever notice during actual gameplay, at the cost of the majority of your frames

Change lighting/mood. I am assuming it's not just a straight toggle and you have to tweak parameters yourself.

Please keep slop away from LOTR. I can't believe I even need to ask

How you tweak it for your personal viewing is up to you. You already can run it through AI tools to add detail or smooth effects or even turn it into a cartoon if you want to.

Will take some time, will use a lot of energy, will require a decent card or a lot of credits but this can be done today.

Personally I don't think anything will improve it, as I don't care for it already. Just had to say it as your claim it's the best trilogy ever is subjective. Much like the results of processing it with AI.

To me the graphics always look fine. The lighting might be slightly off but what really takes me out of it quick is the physics. When things don’t move right it’s off putting. Like the gravity is weird or the biomechanics are just wonky. Perfect example was some of the earlier spider-man movies. The web swinging especially. It just always looked off.

If it is also bad, than it would be more correct to say that both of them are useless.

What does it represent to you? Once upon a time the idea of robots or machinery doing all our work for us, it was a dream. Only under capitalism is that a bad thing, because then people won't be forced to work for unedible money. AI could be a great thing. Under capitalism though, it represents something potentially terrible.

Tell me something, if AI technology applied to protein folds helps us discover a cure for cancer or alzheimers, would you refuse the treatment "because it's AI"? Then apply that to any other technological shortcut that created our modern medicine, like MRIs and CT scans or EKG's. Are those great technologies, or "a ton of lost jobs that humans could have done"? "CT scans are bad because it requires less brain surgeons," or "EKG's are bad because a human could be doing those measurements but have been cheaped out by technology." "What about the cognitive offloading from pocket calculators?" (A real argument made at the time, btw.) Did you know that in Victorian times it was someones job to walk down the streets ringing a bell to wake people up in the morning? People were paid to knock on peoples windows so that they could wake up at a certain time. Are you mad at alarm clocks for taking their jobs? How is AI any different but just on a bigger scale? What are the problems that AI implementation and shortcuts that DOESN'T have to do with relying on a paycheck to live? Is relying on a paycheck to live the only way a society can function? Or does capitalism depend on that, and anything that shakes that is potentially dangerous to our capitalist-centric society?

Capitalism can't handle AI. That's not AIs fault, that's capitalisms shortcomings and inherent unsustainability. Everything wrong with AI is just capitalism, I have yet to see evidence prove me otherwise.

characters look worse, like AI slop filters were added over their faces and bodies

In many cases that's true, but not in all cases. Makes sense considering that no games have had this technology to be used in their art direction, no wonder it looks like ass. If your only citation for this take is that one Resident Evil screenshot that made headlines then I suggest you look at the world deeper than just headlines and clickbait engagement farming articles.

creative vision of the people making the game is bastardized behind these “enhancements” altering the look and feel of the game.

I guess all these mods that revamp textures or do ENB shaders or lighting adjustments are "bastardizing" the creative vision too. I would argue that even running a game on low-medium settings for the sake of framerate is bastardizing the creative vision, as artists worked very hard to produce high quality assets meant to be seen in it's highest fidelity. Do you consider running games on lower graphics settings a bastardization? Didn't think so.

higher bar for entry for performance requirements and still getting poor performance if you do bite the bullet for a more expensive setup

Again, same with every new generation of graphics tech. It's always a higher entry for performance, it's always in the hands of the few first, and poor performance is also, again, not the fault of AI but bad optimization.

a lot of these games aren’t that good, don’t get me wrong a few are, but having to buy extra equipment and push your PC to get marginally better graphics to play an “okay” game isn’t gonna make people jump for joy.

There have always been games that are shit but pushed for graphics, in damn near every console generation since PS2. It's a unique selling point to have shiny graphics. The good games that last on good gameplay and good optimization for good performance are lauded, and for good reason. AI won't change that, if anything make even cooler stuff like HL2 did with it's latest tech. You know what does make shitty games? Situations such as "Studio with best selling game lays off 40% of its developers." And before you say "But they're doing that because AI," again AAA studios have always been doing that since way before, in other industries too, since Thomas Edison. All the EA and Ubisoft controversy? Way before AI. The problem is capitalism, and execs at the top making a buck at the expense of good quality products with planned obsolescence and cheaping out their workers. This is a problem in every industry, AI or not. But these stupid companies that are investing entirely into AI at the expense of good art, writing, and gameplay (whether it uses AI or not) will always fail because it's slop. It's the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory "Machines stole my toothpaste job" stuff, old man yelling at cloud behaviour. It's the exact same logic that blames immigrants for stealing our jobs, without even looking at the bosses who are firing workers and replacing them with exploited immigrants. Is the problem immigration or over exploitation? I view things more towards the latter.

I love AI for what it could be, but we're not ready for it under capitalism. Cognitive offload is only a concern for people who don't respect learning and understanding to begin with, which under capitalism most people don't, being stupid and thoughtless gets you rich these days. I say get them out in the open, let them fail, they deserve it. Smart people don't fall for it. Capitalism is using AI to destroy itself for short-term gains and it's happening right before our eyes - "Capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with," and all that.

What an utterly constructive addition to the conversation, cheers.