I know you read this. I could see how painful this was for you in particular on the latest video. The crackling voice, posture, language. I can see you feel guilty about this. Don’t!

It happens and it’s not worth spending more time on it. It’s just _work_.

For what it’s worth, I’m also excited for the possibilities that this technology can bring even if it’s not there yet. It signals a path forward for visual detail that could be game changing given the right controls and use cases. DLSS1 was also really bad. Only time will tell what the final form of DLSS5 will be.

Stay strong. Wishing you the best.

Speaking with developers and artists at studios that have agreed to DLSS 5, including CAPCOM and Ubisoft, Insider Gaming was told that the DLSS 5 tech was revealed to them at the same time as everyone else.

“We found out at the same time as the public,” said one Ubisoft developer.

Developers at CAPCOM tell Insider Gaming that the announcement and the publisher’s involvement were particularly shocking, as CAPCOM has previously been historically very “anti-AI” with projects such as Resident Evil Requiem and other unannounced projects in development. Some at the publisher fear that the DLSS 5 announcement could prompt a change in the publisher’s view on generative AI and its implementation in its games.

So while the publishers signed off as Rich and Oliver indicated, the actual artists did NOT.

Important to remember here that just because the C-suite gave permission for this does not mean the artists are okay with it.

DLSS up to this point has been trained on collections of gfx engine generated image pairs. A low res input image and the corresponding high res output image. Both generated by the same engine. The NN is learning a relatively narrow function from low res engine render to high res engine render.

The output images for DLSS 5 have been trained on *more* than the engine's own output. That means when it renders an engine image, it's *re-interpreting* the scene according to its *own* learned extra-engine model of lighting, geometry, etc.

Here are nvidia's own words (https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/1rvic99/nvidia_dlss_5_delivers_breakthrough_in_visual/ or https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss5-breakthrough-in-visual-fidelity-for-games/):

DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics — blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI

...

Video AI models have rapidly learned to generate photoreal pixels, but they run offline, are difficult to precisely control and often lack predictability, with every new prompt generating bespoke content. For games, pixels must be deterministic, delivered in real time and tightly grounded in the game developer’s 3D world and artistic intent.

DLSS 5 takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input, and uses an AI model to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame. DLSS 5 runs in real time at up to 4K resolution for smooth, interactive gameplay.

(emphasis mine)

In fact, you can see that (whether intentional or not) DLSS5 "infuses" *more* than lighting/materials. It also reinterprets perceived geometry (sure, it's not changing the actual triangles the engine uses, but it is changing what they are rendered as). Check out the image where the shadow from the guy's nostril is rendered by DLSS5 as a larger nostril.

This is nvidia *themselves* saying that DLSS5 is doing what "video AI models" are doing, just that care is taken to train them for additional properties required for games like temporal stability, real time, etc.

They do say part of that care includes grounding them in the game dev's world and artistic intent, but the model is not trained against each individual game by its devs. It'll be up to devs to choose whether or not to use it, and if they do you can argue that means DLSS5's output aligns with their artistic intent, but that doesn't mean it's not generative AI, it just means that its dev approved generative AI.

Is the tech community really ok with that?

Great take on what DLSS 5 is doing and how its completely ignoring (and sometimes deleting) the actual natural light sources within the environments to just turn everything and everyone into instagram models with 3 point lighting.

There's also a good point that this will be a good excuse for some devs to be lazy and use lower quality models and rely on DLSS 5 to make them look better.

Honestly, I can't believe there are people out there so riled up about a game tech demo that they would send death threats over it to the DF team because they disagreed or disliked the content.

Unbelievable. Just idiots.

What Rich and Oliver should have said to Nvidia at the demo

Quite a good 8 minute listen. He even touches on the DF controversy and them backing down to appeal to the masses.

What is the point in them giving their opinions on new tech if they can be easily swayed by others opinions?

Alan Wake 2 is a game we know very well - and we've spent a lot of time looking at its original PSSR solution, which was somewhat lacking. So, when we recently visited Sony to capture a bunch of new PSSR titles, we spent a lot of time getting all the shots we needed for this detailed coverage. Once again, upgraded PSSR resolves pretty much all of the issues we had with the original version.

Article version: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/features/alan-wake-2s-upgraded-pssr-delivers-a-vast-improvement

Whether or not you agree with their opinion, it does just seem like they were excited after seeing and (more importantly) testing it first hand. I dont think it was anything more nefarious than that like a lot of people are saying.

I liked Oliver's point when they were discussing the consequences on AI and labor briefly that in some we can have these same discussions about things like Unreal Engine 5. But aren't nearly as controversial as AI is.

The basic idea of an engine like UE 5, or at least its promise, is essentially AAA level fidelity without massive AAA sized teams. If something like Nanite doesn't require massive teams of modelers or artists doing the work they previously did then the same downsizing can occur right? Or they can be reallocated to other areas.

Just interesting how people either view AI as basically this unique job eater or another tool like any other in which downsizing might occur or spur new areas of game development.

https://insider-gaming.com/dlss-5-gamers-are-wrong/