Gee, we've had over a half century of computer graphics at this point. However, suddenly when a technology arises that requires obscene amount of GPU's to generate a results a GPU manufacturer is here to tell us that all computer graphics without that new technology is dead for... reasons. I cannot see any see any connections between these points.
What do you mean "suddenly"? I was running path tracers back in 1994. It's just that they took minutes to hours to generate a 480p image.
The argument is that we've gotten to the point where new rendering features rely on a lot more path tracing and light simulation that used to not be feasible in real time. Pair that with the fact that displays have gone from 1080p60 vsync to 4K at arbitrarily high framerates and... yeah, I don't think you realize how much additional processing power we're requesting.
But the good news is if you were happy with 1080p60 you can absolutely render modern games like that in a modern GPU without needing any upscaling.
I think you just need to look at the PS5 Pro as proof that more GPU power doesn't translate linearly to better picture quality.
The PS5 Pro has a 67% beefier GPU than the standard PS5 - with a price to match - yet can anyone say the end result is 67% better? Is it even 10% better?
We've been hitting diminishing returns on raw rasterising for years now, a different approach is definitely needed.
Yeah, although I am always reluctant to quantify visual quality like that. What is "65% better" in terms of a game playing smoothly or looking good?
The PS5 Pro reveal was a disaster, partially because if you're trying to demonstrate how much nicer a higher resolution, higher framerate experience is, a heavily compressed, low bitrate Youtube video that most people are going to watch at 1080p or lower is not going to do it. I have no doubt that you can tell how much smoother or less aliased an image is on the Pro. But that doesn't meant the returns scale linearly, you're right about that. I can tell a 4K picture from a 1080p one, but I can REALLY tell a 480p image from a 1080p one. And it's one thing to add soft shadows to a picture and another to add textures to a flat polygon.
If anything, gaming as hobby has been a tech thing for so long that we're not ready to have shift to being limited by money and artistic quality rather than processing power. Arguably this entire conversation is pointless in that the best looking game of 2024 is Thank Goodness You're Here, and it's not even close.
Yeah, there's a reason any movie attempting 3D CG with any budget at all has used path tracing for years. It's objectively massively higher quality.
You don't need upscaling or denoising (the "AI" they're talking about) to do raster stuff, but realistic lighting does a hugely better job, regardless of the art style you're talking about. It's not just photorealism, either. Look at all Disney's animated stuff. Stuff like Moana and Elemental aren't photorealistic and aren't trying to be, but they're still massively enhanced visually by improving the realism of the behavior of light, because that's what our eyes understand. It takes a lot of math to handle all those volumetric shots through water and glass in a way that looks good.
Yep. The thing is, even if you're on high end hardware doing offline CGI you're using these techniques for denoising. If you're doing academic research you're probably upscaling with machine learning.
People get stuck on the "AI" nonsense, but ultimately you need upscaling and denoising of some sort to render certain tier of visuals. You want the highest quality version of that you can fit in your budgeted frame time. If that is using machine learning, great. If it isn't, great as well. It's all tensor math anyways, it's about using your GPU compute in the most efficient way you can.
Devils advocate: Splatting, dlss, neural codecs to name a few things that will change the way we make games
DLSS doesn’t work that well. I’m not looking forward to AI replacing artist’s work.
I'm not sure I agree with you on the former, DLSS is pretty remarkable in its current iteration
Agreed, things like DLSS are the right kind of application of AI to games, same with frame generation. The wrong kind is trying to figure out how to replace developers, artists of every kind, actors, etc in the production process with AI. That being said though, companies like Nvidia absolutely can and will profit off making sure that a game cannot run well on anything but the latest hardware that they sell, so the whole “you need to buy our stuff to play games because it has the good ai and now all games require the good ai” is capitalist bullshit
Ray tracing actually will directly change the way games are made. A lot of time is spent by artists placing light sources and baking light maps to realistically light scenery - with ray tracing, you get that realism "for free".
DF did a really interesting video on the purely path traced version of Metro: Exodus and as part of that, the artists talked about how much easier and faster it was to build that version.
Sounds like a bad thing tbh.
RIP the future of high end computer graphics. 1972 to 2024. You had a good run.
The brute forcing of AI into anything goes into the next stage.
Good thing I don’t care that much about graphics since I’ve been a teenager.
This feels like its establishing a precedent for widespread adoption/implementation of AI into consumer devices. Manufactured consent.
"We compute one pixel... we hallucinate, if you will, the other 32."
Between this and things like Sora, we are doomed to drown in illusions of our own creation.
the premise seems flawed, i think.
i feel what he's saying is: we suck optimizing gfx performance now because gamers deem ai upscale quality as passable
this feels opposite to what the ps poll says that gamers enable performance mode more because the priority is more stable frames than shiny anti aliasing/post processing.
I don't see how that's the case. Most people prefer more fps over image quality, so minor artifacting from DLSS is preferable to the game running much slower with cleaner image quality. That is consistent with the PS data (which wasn't a poll, to my understanding).
I also dispute the other assumption, that "we suck at optimizing performance". The difference between now and the days of the 1080Ti when you could just max out games and call it a day, is that we're targeting 4K at 120fps and up, as opposed to every game maxing out at 1080p60. There is no target for performance on PC anymore, every game can be cranked higher. We are still using CounterStrike for performance benchmarks, running at 400-1000fps. There will never be a set performance target again.
If anything, optimization now is sublime. It's insane that you can run most AAA games on both a Steam Deck and a 4090 out of the same set of drivers and executables. That is unheard of. Back in the day the types of games you could run on both a laptop and a gaming PC looked like WoW instead of Crysis. We've gotten so much better at scalability.
Chasing graphics has lead to directions nobody could predict and I'm glad I don't play these games.
What's up with the biker jacket?
It's a stupid gimmick like Steve Jobs' turtleneck.
Techbros
His version of a weighted blankie.
Oh here he is again, talking AI AI AI.... Their stock value is already so high it will take over 50 years for it's value to match it's current price.
I been playing old games on private servers. Its been nice.
Star Wars Galaxies or PSO?
Star Wars Galaxies private servers are not a good experience. They don't allow two players from the same IP, so if you live with someone you want to play with you have to tell them, then send them pictures of BOTH copies of the discs and you and the other person's hands. They hide behind "preventing gold farmers" but like, who is actually going to be a gold farmer in a private server, and who actually cares if they did? The other 25 players in the server?
Nah, I'm good.
City of Heroes has been golden by comparison.
Oh wow, I haven’t played that in forever… If the community up and running? What’s the update at, are we talking early days, Fire/Fire Defender or different builds altogether? Not even sure where my discs are in the garage. 🤔
This is the webpage for the project. It will have everything you want to know, and if you can't find it there or the forums, there is also a wiki.
Awesome, thanks. I never would’ve expected it was so simple. 😅
City of Heroes has been golden by comparison.
-homecoming gang represent.
Tell me of these PSO private servers you speak of.
Can’t say there is one, at least not yet. The talks for PSO2.
Unfortunately PSU, as all my friends veto'd me for PSO first. But PSOBB is next, and hopefully by then Team Clementine will have released their PSO2 Original.
You’re lucky to have friends into the same stuff, I couldn’t pay my friends to play an MMO. I got one girlfriend too, but she didn’t like how much I played. I never got to play BB, what’s it like? And PSO2 was my favorite, the memories… A chance to get back into that, dare I say, it almost felt perfect somehow.
Keep an eye on Team Clementine, they'll launch it eventually. Blue Burst is just PSO with extra content at the end game. Pretty fun theres some private servers that show up first hit with a web search.
We can't do the profitable thing without the more expensive and even more lucrative thing, please, think of our monopoly.
Yes you can. Easily. You're sitting on the infrastructure to do it.
Pre-built.
We're at that point in Brazil where everything behind the screens is devastated and wrecked for profit, and now if you want to see any sign of nature you need a graphics card.
But that's in California, where anything natural is on fire or is sliding across Malibu into the ocean.
So just a preview unless these people are stopped.
I never run the upscaling it looks and feels so bad.
computer graphics has existed for quite long. It seemed possible to do just last year.
Sounds like a skill issue.
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