Is DLSS STILL Ruining Games?

[@vextakes]

ummm... pls

[@vextakes]

(full take is at 10:30)

[@WhiteTyrone]

yes.

[@Szabbyhun]

Well, the strange thing is, that some older games without any of this stuff still looks really good. So my question is: is it possible to make a beautiful game without these demanding newer stuff (ray-tracing, nanite, etc...)? I mean imagine you can play these newer AAA games in 1080p/720p with satble locked 30fps on the lowest or some on medium settings with a 1050ti, WITHOUT upscaling. That would be insane ngl. Why i said this? well because for example: MGRR is still looks really good without any ray-tracing and all, and AC Unity, and Batman Arkham Knight for other examples too. So imgaine if these games had higher resolution textures, and a with a little-more higher poly assets. But i know, pepole want more realistic stuff(and then complain, that it runs trash, and sometimes, it looks really bad like an uglier ps3 or ps2 game), and hardware makers want money too.

[@paulboyce8537]

IMO at lower end GPU's upscaling should be a thing to make the game playable. At mid range and top end you shouldn't need to have upscaling. But that's how it is going. INTEL is just beginning but their idea is to pair the CPU and that to me seem to be a winner. Not bad on Alchemist but I think we will start to see the true potential from Battlemage.

[@Millsy2024]

your so strange Vex i can run Alan Wake 2 with my 5800x and 6750xt with ease 90 fps in most areas lows go as far down as 68 fps but back to 75 80 fps very quickly i just think you need to learn how to use adreanaline software properly if you have any questions as im an expert in amd software.

[@agnisbuh]

imo upscaling is good but devs shouldnt use it as an excuse to skip optimizing games

[@iscream29fsh]

I agree

[@R3TR0J4N]

true

[@xtradi]

yeah shouldn't be a crutch , the top end GPU must be playable without DLSS

[@AlucardNoir]

The problem with that mentality is that you're implying there is any optimization left to have. If you make an unreal engine 5.3 game, you are either making two games as Vex said, or you just turn lumen and nanite on and increase the minimum system requirements. US5 is just significantly more resource intensive than previous generations. Yesterday I installed The Talos Principle 2, a brand new UE5 game and the performance is decent only because the devs went out of their way to give an alternative to Lumen. And again, the performance is decent. It's great performance for an UE5 game, but it would be considered shit where this any other generation. And that's because Nanite and Lumen are incredibly resource intensive. No game that uses both is going to perform the same way as a game using a more traditional pipeline. And this isn't a matter of optimizing as much as it is the reality of newer software needing more powerful hardware. We've reached a turning point, and the thing is, much of what used to be optimization was just using tricks to make the game look as good as any game UE5 game looks out of the box. The problem is that many of those tricks are incompatible with nanite and lumen. Lumen is a full light simulation, hardware acceleration is pretty much the only way to optimize it. That or just more powerful hardware in general. The alternative is not to use it and do the same work dev studios used to do before for the results we got before, both visual and performance wise. That's the problem with pretending devs are skipping the optimization step. They're not, but the software they make use of is far more demanding. Optimizing means not using features like nanite, mesh shaders, lumen and the like.

[@jessefisher1809]

@@AlucardNoir I think there is much truth to what you say. New consoles are out that can move a lot of data, those are the primary targets - and pcs get left-overs. That, is gonna require new hardware, sorry 1060 owners. Also, we are running into diminishing returns with hardware, not totally there, but getting there. Thats why Nvidia and AMD are turning to software solutions to help performance. So in a way we could think of dlss as new avaliable performance, clearly developers are going to use that... Just like with every other generation. At the same time, I don't think everybody else is completely wrong either. Upscaling shouldn't be leaned on so hard to the point where the game is unplayable on modern hardware without it. Developers should spend more time polishing their games before release. A lot of these shitty performing games run fine in a years time. Clearly that is not a hardware issue, or a engine issue, thats just a... time management or perhaps a quality control issue I guess you could say. In short, I see both sides of this argument.

[@someunfunnyguy9574]

Remember when GPUs used to effortlessly run new games without upscaling and costing a fortune? Good times

[@XtremeConditions]

2016 was a hell of a time on both teams. Acceptable 1440p gaming in most titles, for $250 tops, often less... Wow.

[@Deliveredmean42]

Depending who you ask that live through the 90s ansld 2000s of gaming they will either say yes or no depending on the generation. Because there was also the ocassional times when they barely made a difference or thr rare case that they were worse.

[@張彥暉-v8p]

I remember back when the best GPU couldn't play the latest games in 720p 30 fps tho,

[@stangamer1151]

This was when most screens were 720p and 1080p. Upscaling would not make any big difference back then. While now 4K became mainstream. And since it is very demanding resolution, especially in games which use full res effects, there is a need to save some GPU resources to maintain high framerates.

[@wildeyshere_paulkersey853]

​@@張彥暉-v8pWhen was that, dude?

[@leelester69]

To me, it seems like a step backwards. It is clear that the technology is still in its early stages and is not yet optimized. This, however, is not a valid excuse for game developers to neglect proper optimization of their games. These features should be considered a last resort rather than the go-to solution.

[@stangamer1151]

1080p to 2160p was just too big step up. 4x more pixels to render. While GPUs have never had such a big performance boost. That's why we have upcalers, they are existing to ease lives of game devs and GPU manufacturers. 4K marketing is the main problem here. If TVs could step up to 1440p first, it would be much easier for everyone. But somehow TV manufacturers refused to make 1440p screens. Real 4K GPUs are still yet to be released. And we already hear about 8K TVs mass production plans... 8K is 4x more pixels than 4K - another large jump in pixel quantity. Which means upscalers will never go away. On the contrary, they will become more aggressive in terms of scaling. For 8K they will recommend to use "Ultra Perfromance" presets.

[@stangamer1151]

@@eye776 1080 Ti these days performs on par with 3060, which is a previous gen midrange GPU. So it is a bit weaker then PS5. Plus, Nvidia usually decently suppors only 3 last generations of their GPUs in terms of drivers. No wonder 1080 Ti essentially became 720p/60 or 1440p/30 card.

[@kanjakan]

I agree with you, but I think devs are optimizing their games as best they can. For example, Alan Wake II is honestly very well optimized but it pushes contemporary hardware to its very limit, similar to what Crysis did. Like Vex said in the video, we're entering a new age of graphical fidelity. Ray traced lighting and high poly count assets are the norm now and it would take significant resources to essentially create a potato version of the game. Unfortunately, hardware just hasn't caught up yet, so for now, devs use DLSS as a stop gap solution. On the bright side, I think we will reach a plateau soon and things will run smoothly again, that is, until the next big thing in graphics comes along.

[@MrFaleh1129]

@@stangamer1151the 4090 is considered a real 4K GPU !

[@istvanszabo5745]

@@MrFaleh1129Is it tho? A 4090 runs cyberpunk at 4k with maxed settings at 20 fps, without dlss and frame generation. Only at 1080p a 4090 can push 60+ fps.

[@NeilMoore]

Is dlss ruining games? No. Are devs ruining games? No. Are publishers ruining games? Yes.

[@illpunchyouintheface9094]

It’s everyone’s fault. You won’t believe how many people are in these jobs who do not belong

[@VeteranR]

​@@illpunchyouintheface9094 Yep. Many developers today don't even play games or have any interest in it.

[@aregulargenericname8794]

No, its all, devs have it easy, yes, they have it easy, but the point is all, all of em are ruining it, if you put it all on publishers, well thats just a strawman

[@NeilMoore]

@@aregulargenericname8794 devs are not the final decision makers. Devs strive to do the best job they can, but at the end of the day, if a publisher doesn't grant enough time for the devs to optimize their game, then what were stuck with is DLSS and FSR being the only thing between you and a playable framerate. I'm sorry bud, it's not a strawman, it's the truth. If you don't want to believe the truth that's your choice. I can't convince you of the obvious.

[@bestopinion9257]

Do not forget people bought Nvidia for DLSS feature. So Nvidia fanboys are ruining games.

[@beyondearth6418]

While I largely/mostly agree with your opinions and observations, we all have noticed a serious performance degradation of many (not all) games over the past 2-3 years without necessarily providing increased visual fidelity. We have numerous game examples of that in our basket already. I still argue that a large majority of game studios still omit much needed optimisations in the name of $$$; and this will backfire at them all.

[@FastFilmFX]

Another thing that’s happening is “brain drain”. Older, experienced devs who know the quirks of the in-house codebase leave due to retirement, layoffs, bad working conditions, etc and younger, less experienced devs take over. The studio has no documentation because the imposed deadlines never allowed it, so the studio gradually gets less familiar with their own engine. Then a corporate mandate makes them switch to Unreal, which they also don’t understand.

[@michelkohlenberger437]

@@FastFilmFX the moment a game company becomes a joint-stock company is the moment when they leave their creativity and art behind. We see this everyday when we look at once higly viewed game devs who got corrupted by stupid expectations of shareholders to generate them quick money...

[@SnrubSource]

Will it though? Brainless mass consumers buy shitty games anyways regardless of performance

[@Megatholis]

Cities skylines 2, hogwarts legacy, the isle, cyberpunk, starfield, the list goes on all of these games ran like garbage at launch and the only one that has gotten remotely better was cyberpunk

[@fallout560]

that's not dlss's fault. thats devs not optimizing

[@edzymods]

What's the point in real time lighting/shadows over baked on everything, when mostly everything is static. I see the benefit if the game has day/night cycles.

[@evaone4286]

Exactly

[@badpuppy3]

You can't have dynamic changing worlds with baked lighting...like destructible environments, because once you change the objects in the world, the baked lighting doesn't work.

[@yancgc5098]

⁠​⁠​⁠@@badpuppy3 Thing is most games don’t have impressive destruction or even any dynamic destruction at all, so having everything rendered in real-time is a dumb inefficient way to render things

[@badpuppy3]

​@@yancgc5098 What games did in the past is irrelevant. This is laying the groundwork for the future dude.

[@edzymods]

@@badpuppy3 Dynamic changing worlds.. give us a break with the bullshit for 10 minutes. If you truly think that, then you're a gullible sheep. The whole reason they are pushing this tech in every game is because it saves them time as it's much easier to implement. You think they are going to spend a huge chunk of budget on dynamic changing and destructible world's? I have someone that needs to reach you about your cars extended warranty 😂😂

[@witekborowski1410]

IMHO, if the hardware is not ready for RT and other fancy fearures, they should remain in a tech demo realm. Upscaling sounded like a cool thing 4 years ago, but now, because of it (and the frame gen) nVidia, and AMD are trying to sell us slow GPU for the price of a higher tier one, while game devs (or rather publishers) are using it as THE performance optimization technique. While it is somewhat passible in Alan Wake 2, as the game looks really good, in Starfield it is not, as the graphics aren't amaising.

[@arenzricodexd4409]

"IMHO, if the hardware is not ready for RT and other fancy fearures, they should remain in a tech demo realm." if they do that then there is no justification for high end hardware. just look what happen the past decade or so. i still remember in 2009/2010 GPU are very fast even mid range GPU are quite capable at 1080p. crysis finally being tame with GPU start reaching 60FPS at 1080p at the highest setting without MSAA. so what did GPU maker did? they push something like eyefinity to justify the need of high end GPU or even multi GPU setup. GPU getting faster and then they start introduce 4k gaming. but 4k adoption is extremely slow so what they do? they introduce RTRT in games.

[@shebeski]

​@@arenzricodexd4409multimonitor is used in simulators all the time now due to that development. It wasn't a gimmick at all. RT is totally different from resolution. If anything we've regressed from 1080p to get Ray tracing and I'm on board, because the QUALITY OF THE PIXELS MATTERS MORE THAN THE QUANTITY.

[@truthseeker1995]

@@shebeski --- In computer graphics, the quantity of pixels determines the quality. If the resolution is too low the quality of pixels plummets into a smudged mess.

[@arenzricodexd4409]

@@shebeski gimmick or not what's important is it makes the games more demanding. That way people see the necessity of faster gpu. RTRT happen because 4k adoption are very slow. They can't push 8k when not even 1440p become a mainstream.

[@shebeski]

@@arenzricodexd4409 they're pushing RT because it's the end game of game development. It speeds up development and gives us more immersive and realistic environments. We're in a transition phase for rendering. 8k will likely never be mainstream because it has no benefit.

[@3pokrobloxvideos456]

insane that we need to upgrade our pc every 2 years bc of these badly optimized games

[@evaone4286]

Screw them I ain't upgrading every year.

[@lycanthoss]

Or just don't play badly optimised games? Except for Alan Wake 2 I don't think I've seen a game recently that justifies its low FPS.

[@mycelia_ow]

You don't need to upgrade. we have things like FSR, DLSS, and settings optimizations. If you buy a high enough tier card you won't have to upgrade that much anyway.

[@Andriy17UA]

Thats why DLSS and FSR exist to make your GPU last longer so you dont have to upgrade PC every year.

[@wildeyshere_paulkersey853]

​@@Andriy17UAyou capin

[@ChaosFraktal]

Yes it is. It's still excusing poor programming, caused by greedy, rushed development cycles dictaded by some scummy CEOs.

[@evanrutledge-sz4yo]

I don’t think the issue is DLSS, it’s greedy publishers using it as a short cut

[@jipeh]

Technology is ruining technology?

[@googIesux]

@@jipeh no, abuse of technology is ruining the potential good of technology.

[@nightvision3182]

Sure publishers, Nvdia, etc.... have shown over and over again to be greedy, but it takes two to Tango, stop buying overpriced products so they will have no other choice then to deliver correctly, that is the harsh reality here.@@evanrutledge-sz4yo

[@rushiltyagi8473]

As a amd graphics card owner i would never prefer upscaling Just upgraded from 1050ti to rx6700xt and i still have to use upscaling like wtf

[@Liinuli.]

Your gpu is a little better than that of a PS5. And ps5 uses upscaling in games to hit 60 fps.

[@blasianking4827]

@@eye776 It's not enough to play games at max settings sure, but come on you can absolutely comfortably play new games with a 6700XT. Use upscaling, tune your settings.

[@dante19890]

yeah cuz ur on amd and fsr is not good. DLSS quaity is so close to native and even exceeds it at points

[@rushiltyagi8473]

@@dante19890 did anyone ask about nvedia ?

[@prafullrahangdale666]

​@@dante19890😂😂😂😂

[@sergione371]

Maybe it's because I'm 32 years old, but I liked very much playing Alan Wake 2. I didn't care about dlss or fsr, I just played, period. And oh God if I had fun with it, I almost forgot this sensation of enjoying the game without worrying about the fps... I advise you to play like me, it's liberatory

[@ChrisPFuchs]

I didn't like his use of Alan Wake 2 as an example anyways. That game does scale back really well, and keeps its visual look because it has such great baked lighting and mesh shaders.

[@gvulture1277]

You're in the wrong video for that, your comment is why consoles exist, they are made and designed for someone who just wants to put in a disc and play. PCs are personal, let people do what they want.

[@serily4524]

nothing to do with ur age

[@ktvx.94]

As always it's not the tech, it's how it's used. Being able to update your game is objectively an amazing thing, and yet it's the cause for so many of our woes as players.

[@muhammadsatriamahardika7693]

DLSS is ruining my 2023 game experience

[@CharlesVanNoland]

With so many companies laying off a decent chunk of their workforce, the price of goods we need and use on the daily getting crazier and crazier, and a recession that makes 2009's look tame: I can either buy your new fancy shiny looking games or the GPU and CPU to properly run it the way it's meant to be played in another year or three - but right now I can't afford both. People are against a wall right now, financially speaking, and even if super deluxe looking games are coming out that doesn't mean people have the financing to enjoy it. Everyone is stuck using mid-tier GPUs, or top-tier GPUs that are equivalent to today's mid-tier, if even that. As a graphics programmer for 20+ years my opinion is that upscaling technologies are a cheap hack until they can get rid of the temporal artifacts entirely - and I don't see that ever happening, not without neural network models that end up requiring the same compute cost as just rendering pixels natively. You will always have disocclusion issues and reflection/specularity moving the wrong way at times, and these are things that we don't have with native pure raw exact rendering. Games are an interactive medium, motion and action are implied, and these technologies may look nice in screenshots or while the camera is holding still, but that's antithetical to gaming as a whole. I want my fast-paced games to have perfect pixels, every time. These new games coming out can't even run at 1080p at 60FPS on mid-tier GPUs. I guess I'll just go grab some cash from my money tree!

[@AAjax]

This is the point that's missed by the hardware enthusiast youtube crowd. Most people are worried about getting their bills paid and keeping food on the table. Enthusiasts are cheering now that studios have pushed designs past hardware the average gamer owns. But 2023 also saw large numbers of studios laying off staff due to poor returns. These things aren't unrelated.

[@CharlesVanNoland]

@@AAjaxAmen. You get what you give, and they ain't giving. Sure, super rad futuristic graphics are great for clicks and views, for everyone showing them off - including tubers, but when they require hardware that's just plain out of reach for most then the game is out of reach for most, which means profits, or even just getting a return on investment, are out of reach for the developer. If devs want to push the envelope with graphical fidelity, they're going to have to figure out how another way that doesn't involve relying on their audience being able to drop hundreds of dollars on an upgrade. Crytek released a realtime software raytracing demo called Neon Noir back in 2019 demonstrating what was possible.

[@3dcomrade]

I think this is a symptom of the never ending growth mindset. As a persistent patient gamer, BF5 looks mindblowing still as my GPU now is RX 570 on PC and RTX 2050 on laptop. The devs sees the huge jump in hardware performance, but they overestimated it and their expertise to squeeze every inch of performance. Homever, it can be said that not so high hardware performance growth pre-RTX gives the devs a chain to their ambitions. And they began to let all out now

[@dianpan4922]

Upscaling is supposed to be icing on the cake, not a requirement to run games smoothly.

[@DDD-xx4mg]

I think its time through out that rotten potato

[@badpuppy3]

Says who? When Nvidia introduced it, it was clear they were saying this tech would be needed to power gaming in the future as we move to higher fidelity graphics. It was only icing on the cake in the beginning because it wasn't yet widely adopted.

[@Phoboskomboa]

The problem isn't "optimization." The problem is the end of Moore's Law. Devs aren't relying on upscaling because they're lazy. It's literally impossible to keep improving on graphics at the expected rate with traditional rendering that previously was based on the doubling of transistors every 18 months.

[@usafan96soren20]

Yes! That's another problem, they should release a new generation every 3 years and maybe a refresh after an year and an half...18 months it's too little time to make an improvement.

[@Phoboskomboa]

@@usafan96soren20 well, that wasn't the case until recently. Moore's law held for 40+ years, and consumers got used to computers literally doubling in power every 18 months. That's simply not physically possible any more. We can't shrink nodes any further once we're down to a couple nanometers. 2nm is less than four times the length of the silicon atomic unit cell.

[@ni9274]

@@Phoboskomboa that's why tech like upscaling are very important for the future of gaming

[@pottuvoi2]

I would argue that bigger impact was from the end of Dennards scaling in around 2005. The single core performance pretty much halted and only in recent years CPU manufacturers have clawed more performance with huge cost. Although now new processes are getting more and more expensive, so it certainly adds to it.

[@thenilusss4911]

As a game dev i can say that most games aren't optimized. Every game that use DLSS as standard or disable the old rendering methods want to hide their missing optimization. DLSS like every other ai upscaler causes input lag, flickering, restless frames and makes the frames unsharp. When you get enough time from management you normaly optimize the game. When a game has DLSS disabled at default you can rely that the devs tried to optimize the game. In addition there is a second law that say that software will be worse everytime hardware got better, last years software got a lot worse than hardware got better ; )

[@anarchicnerd666]

As much as I agree with you that upscaling is a good thing and an excellent way to claw back performance while retaining a games look, there's a huge problem with upscaling at 1080p which is why so many gamers are up in arms. Garbage in, garbage out, and at 720p internal there simply isn't enough information to reconstruct images with. I think it's partially not enough effort put in the settings menu and the low preset, partially an overreliance on upscaling (at 1080p specifically) and also devs being too keen to switch to RT in the entirety of their rendering pipeline when the technology in graphics cards clearly can't keep up. So it's a lot of things really - stagnation in the graphics card market, poor optimisation for low end cards like the 6600 and A750, too much hype and not enough grunt for RT. I'm sure the job cuts and economic contraction in game development has a part to play too.

[@dakrawnik4208]

1080p is the least likely to need upscaling

[@anarchicnerd666]

@@dakrawnik4208 You'd think so, but Alan Wake 2, Remnant 2, Lords of the Fallen, Immortals of Aveum... there's been a ton of games this year that require upscaling at 1080p low to get playable framerates, especially on entry level cards.

[@istvanszabo5745]

​@@anarchicnerd666 I have a 6650xt, and i play these games on high with 720p rendes res, and i think its totally fine. Yes, there is some shimmering, but i rarely notice it, most noticably in alan wake 2 when im in the mind place, when i have nothing to do but look at the image. Otherwise the image quaility is great, these games are absolutely beautiful. Maybe if you have a keen eye, you will say its not great, but im happy upscaling exist so i can play these games at 60+ fps on an entry level pc.

[@KaizenImpact]

The fact that they have to rely so much to RT for their pipeline, and other stuff when there's actually nothing wrong with the "older" more optimised ways of doing it. And considering that there are a lot of games that looks amazing that don't need to rely on RT, whereas majority of the games nowadays just push "realism" and such instead of making an optimized game just kinda makes you wonder sometimes. Too much stagnation in a lot of ways, the market, the industry, and the list goes on.

[@anarchicnerd666]

@@istvanszabo5745 Funny, I run a 6650 XT too :D I run a 34 inch 3440x1440 monitor too, and I'm blind in one eye - I notice FSR upscaling all the time. It's not bad at 1440p quality scaling but I constantly see stipiling, jaggies, artifacts and all sorts of visual noise. I suppose it depends on the screen you've got and your eye for details, but to my eye, FSR at 1080p is an unusable mess of slurry and jaggies.

[@sheperdofthebrahs]

Quite a good explanation, so Ill throw my two cents in aswell. We might be at the next breaking point when it comes to overall graphics, games never looked as good but things like art direction are getting left behind, look at borderlands 2 and bioshock infinite, old games that still hold up because they are stylized to a point where it doesnt matter as much, modern games are often times goodlooking but boring. Also the raw horsepower required to play them with a decent framerate has skyrocketed. Alan Wake II and Darktide are both pure eyecandy, but that doesnt justify how a 4090, the fastest GPU ever, is being held in a chokehold by them and in my opinion upscaling is a bailout Things are going way too fast, half-@ssed games with poor performance optimization that need at least another year in the oven being released to the public to make a quick buck cant become the new norm, doesnt matter if they try to sway us with fancy pictures

[@nikshakya7389]

Imo, what is the point of making ultra realistic games, if the majority of the player base can't play it smoothly? I think they are rushing by releasing the graphics intensive games while the hardware is catching up very slowly. I mean at this point why not make a full blown movie quality game that runs at 1 fps?

[@JZStudiosonline]

I'm fine with ultra settings in games being unplayable as a means of "future-proofing" but having the difference from ultra to low be going from 45fps to 53 is basically unacceptable. Back when I had my GTX 960 I could barely play Ghost Recon Wildlands on low, which if you're not aware, that game looks legitimately worse than Xbox on low, meanwhile I could play Witcher 3 on medium-high with hair FX n such at a higher framerate. For some reason people kept telling me that having no performance difference between low and ultra is actually a sign of good optimization. And that game was still trying to run at 1080p without raytracing or anything. Now these modern games are trying to push ray-tracing and 4k on top of terrible optimization.

[@ChrisPFuchs]

I don't like Alan Wake 2 being used as an example here. It's one of the most optimized games I've played this year. The only reason you need upscaling with a 4090 as you say is because Path Tracing is so incredibly demanding. They didn't have to implement Path Tracing. It looks fantastic with its baked lighting and it scales back really well.

[@JZStudiosonline]

@@ChrisPFuchs How showed the performance difference between low and high was only maybe 15fps. That's not a big difference when both are under 60. I mean, it is, but both are still crap.

[@ChrisPFuchs]

@@JZStudiosonline 15 fps of 60 fps is significant considering the game looks great at all low. If you consider Ray Tracing and Path Tracing the fps difference is even more massive. It's a demanding game for sure but you can't argue it's not scalable in my opinion.

[@lucidity910]

I think we should keep in mind that upscaling will almost certainly continue to improve, such that we may not be able to tell the difference at all between native and say, 67% res scale in the future. Definitely agree that, even now, it's better to use quality dlss or fsr instead of turning down settings, since the picture quality isn't that different, while the performance increase is.

[@igorzhukov5390]

DLSS quality is already 66% or something like that, and it is really hard to see any difference with native already at that, especially at higher target resolutions. Mind you, you can find those differences, but you need to actively look for them in most cases.

[@RicHSAD2]

There's two ways to look at it. Devs can use it as a crutch to cover for bad optimisation, or they can use it to bring graphics quality level that would have never been possible before upscaling. In a few short years, we went from Ray Tracing being a dream to now playing games with Path Tracing at playable frame rates. Like it or not, upscaling is what made the dream a reality in 2023.

[@shebeski]

Yup, someone gets it. It went from being just shadows to so much more. Shadow of the Tomb Raider vs Alan Wake 2. Which do you choose visually? Shadow runs like shit for what it looks like in comparison.

[@realmarsastro]

Yeah, like, Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive mode is visually fantastic and could never have been achieved without this technology. That level of path-tracing at playable fps in 4K would need waaaay more powerful hardware to be done natively and in real-time without AI-driven hardware for RT and upscaling.

[@alumlovescake]

Yet games today look worse then in 2018

[@shebeski]

@@alumlovescake no?

[@angeltzepesh1]

I knew this will become mainstream the moment I've seen what DLSS and FSR do. If i buy a 400$+ GPU im expecting to play everything at max(except RT) for at least 2-3 years on 1080p, no upscaling, with a decent frame rate. If i can't do that in a game, that game is either very unoptimized or is a tech demo. Upscaling was supposed to help GPUs after 3-4 years of life, not being mandatory on current gen GPUs.

[@ni9274]

How it's a problem to use DLSS when it doesn't impact the image quality a lot and give free fps ? We don't care about what upscaling was supposed to do, reality is that upscaling has become good enough to reproduce native image quality, this is just a free fps option for most people

[@xviii5780]

how do you know what it was supposed to do? xdd If you think current hardware is not worth the price - don't buy it. That's the only language tech companies understand.

[@angeltzepesh1]

DLSS or FSR will never be as good as native gen period. Why should i pay extra+inflation to play something with upscaling, when a couple years ago could be done in native res? Are we going backwards? And people actually support this?

[@someunfunnyguy9574]

Remember when GPUs used to effortlessly run new games without costing a fortune? Good times

[@minikame2272]

I think the community's strong opposition to upscaling stems at least in part from PCMR memelording back when consoles first started using upscaling techniques later into the console cycles in order to squeeze performance out of dated hardware. A stigma got attached to what is ultimately just an alternative implementation of AA, as dumbed down as that is. AA is how we have been able to avoid needing to supersample images in order to eliminate jaggies this entire time, creating details which ought to not be visible at native resolutions. In a way, native has never been native. But something about using the natural successor to the PS4's 'checkerboard rendering' is rubbing a lot of people up the wrong way.

[@maddscientist82]

Interesting, are you saying PS4 was using upscaling tech that lead to DLSS or current gen upscaling?

[@minikame2272]

@@maddscientist82 yep! checkerboard rendering basically involved rendering a 3d scene by skipping every other pixel, and each row would offset by a pixel as well, in other words you had two opposing diagonal grids of unrendered / black pixels per scene, so you were only ever rendering half the image, a little bit like old school interlacing on steroids. the DLSS-like aspect kicks in when the rendered checkerboard had the missing pixels reconstructed using a mixture of traditional interpolation but also temporal techniques where information from the last few frames were used to improve the accuracy of the reconstruction. not quite ML training, more primitive than that, but much more advanced than standard interpolation. and like DLSS, it was powered by hardware acceleration so it couldn't be performed efficiently on ordinary GPUs. DLSS might not be directly derived from checkerboard rendering, but they exist on the same trajectory.

[@dragojess]

I think we're just moving too fast with graphics when hardware clearly isn't ready for it yet. We need to take a step back and realize that these UE5 technologies are not something that we can really run atm, they are (imo) at least 2 or 3 generations ahead of their time. We shouldn't be forcing change like this before we're ready

[@handsomejustin]

So you're saying that games in 2024 look like any other game that came out 10 years ago isn't enough, you want games to look the same PS4 shit in another 20 years? are you really this stupid?

[@Scott99259]

I really hate gaming now because of this upscaling thing.No games run properly without fake frames and fake pixels

[@xapsus2221]

You're talking about AAA games with stunning graphics, try one game that isn't looking for the best graphics and you'll see that dlss isn't needed there, give a chance to other games :)

[@Scott99259]

@@xapsus2221 only Alan Wale 2 has stunning graphics all other AAA games of 2023 look ordinary

[@pubggamingnation1461]

developers be like "Mah!!! why waste time on optimizing, everyone owns a RTX 4090 these days" 😠😠😠

[@MobileDecay]

When these upscalers were introduced I thought it would increase the life of lower-end gfx cards. Instead, it replaced optimization. You shouldn't need a 4090 to run a game at 1080p 30fps!

[@Ankroth]

This! Exactly this. I really thought that upscalers are great way to increase life of lower-end GPUs. Oh well...

[@cantgameright]

These are growing pains, friends. The issue is not upscaling, it's low VRAM.

[@AL2009man]

I am disappointed that you didn't covered the Console portion of upscalers, given they're practically kickstarted the whole upscaling industry starting in PS4 Pro / Xbox One X mid-gen refresh. manly because we're been introduced to Checkerboard Rendering, Temporal Anti-Aliasing and Temporal Injection/Upsampling, in fact: you can actually use Insomniac's in-house solution on the PC version of their recent games if you like!

[@ChrisM541]

Console is 'the biggie' - they have near-99% locked-in hardware, and that means one thing - upscaling + fake frames are going to be turned on by stealth in more and more 'games'...and the gamer will NOT know it's on, and certainly won't be able to disable it. The GFX menus will be worded suitable vague !!!

[@dante19890]

@@ChrisM541 framegen wont be a mandatory thing like upscaling cuz consoles doesnt support it. Framegen only really works if u have a high base framerate. Framegen with 30fps isnt really gonna work well.

[@spackysQ]

Do you remember when consoles had this upscaling option? Everyone said they are shit or worse. But when the same type of implementation was brought to the PC under the name FSR/DLSS, everyone praised something like this as if it were out of the ordinary. This is how hypocrite people are..

[@dante19890]

@@spackysQ the first upscaling techniques like checkerboard rendering and TAA upscaling wasn't that great. When DLSS2 came about it was a significant step up in quality even rivaling native in a lot of cases.

[@houcinehamdiken2460]

simple solution : dont buy any unoptimazed game until they optimaze it bcs its so obvious that these companies are trying to push old hardware players to change their old gpus and buy the new broken 4000 series

[@badpuppy3]

Nah, I'm not going to support you.

[@houcinehamdiken2460]

your opinion bro in that case u should rebuild your pc every 2 years at least@@badpuppy3

[@Ivan-pr7ku]

Some new games (AW2, The Talos Principle 2) already default to either upscaled or "native" output rendering, always going through DLSS, FSR, XeSS or some temporal AA tech, but no direct (internal) render path. At some point in the future, the all those upscalers will be hard-coded in the game engine and we will be lucky to simply have an option to pick the method, if the auto-detect fails. The internal rendering resolution will be capped to 1080 or 1440 at most or something like that.

[@iLLusiveMan82]

Upscalling was a good thing...until it became mandatory. Can't seem to play most AAA games without some sort of upscalling

[@TooBokoo]

My only issue is devs relying on upscaling a bit too much rather than actually programming their games to run well on various hardware. I mean, just look at Alan Wake 2. Even using something like a 2080Ti or 3070, the damn game struggles. Even WITH FSR or DLSS enabled. That's absolutely ridiculous. What's the point of an uspcaling algorithm if your flagship card from only a few years ago can barely hit 30-40fps unless it's internally rendering at 720p? Lol

[@vladvah77]

Bro, RTX 3070 is NOT ( and NEVER was ) a high end card, it's a mid range tier overpriced card with not enough VRAM to game @ 4K resolution in 2022 - 2023....

[@TooBokoo]

@@vladvah77 I never said it was a high tier card or asking it to game at 4k. I was saying it's pathetic that it basically has to render Alan Wake at 720p. in order to hit 30fps. Devs aren't even trying anymore.

[@socks2441]

Spending 5 minutes enabling dlss in the engine is not the same thing as spending actual time working on optimising your game. Dlss is the exact opposite of optimisation as it has allowed Devs to save time and NOT optimise their games.

[@StuffIThink]

unfortunately the 80/20 rule applies to games too. Getting 80% of the way to having photo realism is 20% of the work. The last 20% is 80% of the work. Without upscaling modern gaming consoles would need absurd specs and be completely unaffordable.

[@DanCollier1]

Alan wake 2 is pretty well optimised IMO. Its peoples disdain for having to play on low to get good FPS. The game still looks gorgeous on low!!!!

[@DanCollier1]

Low should have been medium though. I can see why its not though as they wanted to retain a certain visual look for artistic purposes.

[@Velerios]

The answer is the same: YES. Now DLSS/FSR is required to even play the game, not because the game requires it because it's graphics is so good, but because they can now finally drop in DLSS and forget to optimize their game at all. DLSS brought back laziness in the Gaming-Industry; and helps them to reduce QA-Cost. Who needs a good working optimized game, just put in DLSS and call it a day. And Fake Frames now even allow more laziness!

[@Extreme96PL]

Unless your game suck at CPU or memory side then DLSS and FSR will not help you.

[@Mis73rRand0m]

Fake frames on top of fake frames! It's literally just another version of ai replacing human time investment.

[@ni9274]

DLSS and FSR are not required to play most games, and what's the source that say devs don't optimize their game just cause DLSS exist ? DLSS allow many people to play games at 60fps/1440p without upgrading their GPU, better that than having to reduce graphic setting to low. What do you mean by "Fake frames" ? Like if in the future Frame gen is able to increase your FPS without any drop in image quality and without any input lag will you still say it's bad cause it create "Fake frames" ?

[@ni9274]

@@Extreme96PL That's just false, your GPU is used to render higher resolution, so upscaling reduce GPU load

[@Extreme96PL]

@@ni9274 I said about CPU and memory not GPU :)

[@astoraan6071]

DLSS should NEVER be a requirement at a GPU's target resolution to get a playable Framerate i.e. a game running on an RTX 3060 should not require DLSS in order to achieve 60FPS at 1080p, RTX 3070 at 1440p or a 3090 at 4K

[@mercurio822]

Dlss and fsr is for budget gpus. If i pay 1000usd i expect a flawless experiance at 4k

[@evaone4286]

This 👍

[@Kryptic1046]

Agreed. I don't buy a $1000 or $1200 or $1600 gpu to play games at 1080p.

[@wxrm]

God forbid people want good performance at native resolution after spending $800+ on a new graphics card...

[@dwaynethemineraljohnson412]

I really think we shouldn't go this way until gpu's can render it at native resolution and i don't care if that still takes another 5 to 10 years

[@HibiTeamQueso]

Just wait 5 years to play those games then. It's not like there's lack of games out there 😂 Innovation can't and shouldn't be stopped

[@TheGoncas2]

Stop saying these meaningless statements that sound good but don't make any sense. What's "native" resolution? 1080p, 1440p or 4k? What's "GPU's"? Every GPU? The 4090? Or the 4060 too?

[@dwaynethemineraljohnson412]

@@TheGoncas2 native resolution is the resolution you select without having to upscale it and by every gpu i mean 70 class and up because 60 class and below start to become low end

[@theboraxbandit9563]

"Innovation can't and shouldn't be stopped" That's a dangerous road to go down... it reminds me of the quote about scientists questioning whether they can rather than questioning whether they should. Innovation is all well and good until it isn't. I don't think we have the resources to pull off a lot of what has been planned here. It also reminds me of the current state of energy and the green revolution... all of this innovation for new tech to go electric based but yet the average individual can't afford these new changes in the rushed manner it's being implemented with the result of causing harm. I don't think we should force change until we are ready for it. Of course as human beings we are naturally and inherently creative and will continue to create but there is a balance of priority to be found. @@HibiTeamQueso

[@JohnSmith-ty2he]

@@HibiTeamQueso It's more degradation than innovation.

[@SeasoningTheObese]

When Nvidia announces the 5000 series, and the flagship is $4000 dollars, I'm grabbing a used 4000 series, and when that ages out, I'm out of PC gaming. We're seconds away from PCs costing as much as a used car.

[@Tanzu15]

I still hate DLSS and fsr. Why? Cause I can’t fucking get above 60 FPS on cyberpunk in god damn native 1440p on a fucking 4080. And that’s without Path tracing at all. I only use the normal Ray tracing.

[@evaone4286]

I agree. The way I see it, if you purchase top of the line tech in that Gen, then you should be able to achieve top of the line results within games released within that Era. And that just doesn't happen anymore. They want people to upgrade every year and that ain't happening

[@mycelia_ow]

Sounds like a skill issue. My 3090 gets way better frames than that at native 1440p. I get over 100fps with ray tracing. Something's wrong with your system, I'd reinstall Windows maybe you've got some corruption going on.

[@vladvah77]

@@evaone4286and they still can force you to upgrade because that awfully designed video card power connector burns out.....

[@electricant55]

"only use the normal Ray tracing" lmaooo, found the skill issue

[@ReaperX7]

I think it's ruining developers, not just games. I think the push to get realistic games rather than fun games is ruining the gaming experience for many people. Games nowadays are about eye candy and visual effects, rather than trying to be the most fun, exciting, or quirky game that everyone will talk about. I mean look at Minecraft. It's graphics leave a lot to be desired but it's fun. Yeah you can add mods to use RTX and other stuff, but it's a fun game.

[@-psycho-0]

I think the major issue with these tech is the devs these days force you to use them like imagine a generation that if don't have High-end gpu you can only play with High latency and and low base resolution and sadly you don't have to imagine anymore

[@markusjohansson6245]

You can run on low settings if you want high framerate. Noone forces you to use highest. Graphics tech will move forward and older cards will be outdated, thats the reality of pc gaming. I played exclusively on console for over 10 years for this reason, I didnt want to be part of this constant upgrade race.

[@joemarais7683]

⁠@@markusjohansson6245did you watch the video? There’s no difference between low and high anymore.

[@dante19890]

framegeneration will never be a forced features cuz consoles doesnt support it. So devs cannot factor that in the gamedevelopment

[@-psycho-0]

@dante19890 I don't think so pal FSR 3 will indeed be available on Consoles like XSX that's what they said on stage now i don't know if he meant just the upscaling version

[@dante19890]

@@-psycho-0 Thing is u cant really motion interpolate at 30fps which is the consoles target framerate. Framegeneration needs a higher base framerate to function correctly

[@mithrillis]

IMO all methods to "reduce the work needed to render the same graphics" is legitimate, whether it is through culling, LOD, better graphics driver or upscaling. However, I think upscaling is destined to be an intermediate step in the progress of "smart" rendering through machine learning. The eventual goal should be "can we build something that outputs complex 3D scenes without having to deal with complex geometric computations needed to render at high resolution". There already exist early but impressive research that can take a 3D scene and directly output a camera view from any angle, skipping the traditional rendering pipeline altogether. I think the future would be something that effectively combines the precision of traditional rendering and the efficiency of machine learning techniques. Upscaling uses both traditional rendering and ML, but it doesn't skip any of the steps of the rasterisation route, and we are just doing "post-processing". It is effective for now, but I think eventually will be replaced by tighter integration between "brute-force rendering" and "smart rendering".

[@VGamingJunkieVT]

Another big problem with increasing the baseline requirements is upscaling was used to help people with weaker GPU's. Now, weaker GPU's have just been left in the dust completely. Unplayable even with upscaling. Baking lighting isn't that hard to implement, either.

[@cidronsenburg7242]

Thank you for giving nvidia the green light to release 8gb vram GPU for $700 which will force us the average gamer to buy just because our old gpu cant run the latest dlss bs..

[@cuma212]

What nvidia gpu is 700$ for 8gb of vram Could you pass me the link?

[@ni9274]

FSR can run on any GPU

[@SomePotato]

@@cuma212That might be an over exaggeration, but Nvidia has been skimping on RAM for a few generations now. The amounts of RAM we see in the 40 series should have been what was in the 30 series, at least.

[@codeblue6925]

@@cuma212well 4070tis are only 12gb and i dont remember if it goes down to 8 already at 4070 but if it does thats damn close

[@dece870717]

What makes stuff like DLSS almost being required a harder pill to swallow is when you have to spend $800 on a graphics card and need to turn DLSS on because native 1440p is just too much for a $800 card to handle.

[@conditcatsog]

When developing a game the game should get a target framerate of 60 fps on max settings for the base rtx gpus with true optimization and have dlss as an afterthought but at the same time focusing on making the game much more scalable for the weaker gpus but things like nanite can still be used with less triangles which would run extremely well and also give people the option between rasterized lighting or lumen / ray tracing

[@conditcatsog]

Another thing that drags performance is that textures can be very high resolution and may not have a good way to optimize based on distance to camera which can be Another factor to why low settings doesn't make much difference

[@ni9274]

Explain why ? Why it's a problem if you have to use DLSS to get 60fps with barely any drop in image quality. In some case a game can look better with DLSS than without DLSS.

[@xviii5780]

that would assume that games target PC at all (they don't)

[@conditcatsog]

@ni9274 the reason why it would be very beneficial would be that 1 percent lows can be massively improved by having a good base performance but it would also have huge impact with the usage of dlss

[@aaronquarles3902]

I believe that many people in the pc space would agree that upscaling is to be used as a boost and not a requirement. the devs can include all the fancy graphics but just keep it realistic for those who don't want or have cards that can upscale. 60 fps should be a recommended spec without upscalers involved on a modest gpu. They need to be honest in their spec requirements and not say a 3050 can hit 60 fps but it really mean with the most aggressive upscaler options.

[@666Daheretic]

In my opinion I think the main issue is all these technologies were rolled out way too early to farm revenue on hype. Ray tracing, lumen, nanite, etc. are all fantastic but we currently don't have the processing power to do it effectively and efficiently at the same time.

[@cuma212]

Then just don't use them? There is not a single game that forces you to use those technologies

[@oliz5063]

When I’m in a lying competition and my opponent is 666daheretic

[@athraxis]

imagine being this misinformed and thinking you're correct. please stay off the internet.

[@pottuvoi2]

Nanite and Lumen are certainly still evolving. Nanite is consrantly getting new features and aim is to have all geometry to start use Nanite and programmable raster path. Lumen is seeing evolution on both distance field and 'hardware' path. Nanite and Lumen are both limited and designed around on how graphics APIs exposes features on target machines. Hardware RT was born with severe limitations on programmability on PC. Hopefully we will see the change to happen faster than the change from transform&lighting pipeline to compute/mesh shaders on vertex pipeline. It is understandable that all of them were released so early. Having people to use them is good way to find out the weaknesses and start to improve them. Even in non-complete form they are powerful tools.

[@faultier1158]

@@pottuvoi2 And we shouldn't forget that path tracing started was called a technical preview when they brought it to Cyberpunk. It wasn't (and still isn't) the expected default way to play the game and wasn't advertised as such either. That should happen more often imo - new technologies being introduced into already existing games as a real game tech demo.

[@zenpool]

digital foundry folks says that its about the quality of pixels, not the quantity of pixels.

[@divanshu5039]

Well, more pixels mean more quality. Simple as that. It should always be like this get the maximum number of pixels and then work towards making those pixels look beautiful. But instead, this devs, are doing opposite, making things look really damn beautiful and then checking how much pixels it can take.

[@Kbyte27]

Hard disagree on this one. I still see the smudges when activating FSR or using DLSS. From odd flickers, shimmering and even dithering. The very fact that to get a decent quality looking experience you have to spend quite a sum amount of money is ridiculous. Game development have outpaced the hardware industry, and to make things worst, the hardware industry definitely overcharges on GPUs. At the moment, it's still clear to me that up-scaling is ruining my video game playing experience. PS. I've played Alan Wake 2, i have to upscale all the way to performance/ultra performance on certain scenes. It's absolutely noticeable that it's not running on native res.

[@shebeski]

X to doubt. Flicker is almost non existent on modern games with DLSS. If you're having to dip to ultra performance in Alan wake, you've totally mismanaged your system hardware to display resolution (running a 4k monitor with a 3060ti).

[@SamCableguy]

Starfield is one of the ugliest POS I have played recently on my rig

[@FreightTrain22]

I feel like part of the reason the community sentiment about upscaling is bad, is because of the online presence of the AMD fanbase. AMD fans are very passionate and even though they are the minority, you wouldn’t know that by searching around on KZbin. FSR simply is not on the same level as DLSS so obviously AMD fans are not going to be so positive about upscaling.

[@SonicTheHedgehogDXZ]

This is something i only recently realized and im glad someone is bringing this up. Many recent games have such little scalability on its settings. I still get bothered a lot by FSR artifacts and sizzling, Deathloop is one of the few where i felt fine using it.

[@itzjustkris7964]

coz dlss is great fsr is horrible as someone whos used both

[@3dcomrade]

​@@itzjustkris7964its that way in a similar way to iphone having a bigger potential than android. DLSS is specialized, FSR are not. Thus the former is more optimized as there are less configuration compared to the latter

[@AyoItsAntony]

Turning 10+ settings to low quality and fps not improving is actually wild, the laziness in optimization development these days is so sad

[@Maggpieify]

I would rather play a game with no shadows, reflections, particle effects or other fancy looking eye candy. And have the game run on potato mode looking awful, then use upscalers. All the upscalers introduces graphical artifacts in all games theyre inn and as someone who really notice the small details it feels like the game image is less "stable", it feels mushy and shimmering. I would rather not buy a game at all then ever use upscalers, wich is why I skipped several games I normally would be interested inn and just play indie games or older AAA games in my steam library instead. I dont care about why and how, this is the pc platform, the platform of choice, and I chose to never upscale anything. Native rendering or bust. Its a dealbreaker to me, so you all enjoy your upscaled games idc anymore :)

[@shebeski]

Wait, this sounds like someone who hasn't used DLSS in modern titles. We have outlets like Digital foundry completely debunking this. Shimmering and stability is a FORTE of DLSS over "native" TSR or TAA implementations. You're ignorant and wrong. A take that was true in the past but isn't true now.

[@Maggpieify]

@@shebeski This sounds like someone who is full of crap!! I have tested DLSS in modern titles. I got a second hand rtx3070 left over after I did a PC fix. I have tested DLSS in modern games and Digital Foundry says its and I qoute "not noticable" not that its not there. Because theyre tech shills who admits its a thing then goes on to say they dont see it during gameplay because its so small. Well I do. Have you even tried to do a camera spin in Alan wake 2? You see 3 copies of your fking character as a ghost you absolute god damn disingenuous a-hole. Oh and Cyberpunk 2077 still to this day have a double ghost car apearing behind your car when you drive fast. And dead space have awful ghosting in dark scenes. Yeah sure "used to be true" man...... why do you have to lie?

[@soliitudegaming7275]

FSR varies wildly because with each release it was a different version. FSR3 is very competitive with dlss now. It’s gorgeous.

[@CatofTheRed]

"Do devs rely on DLSS too much?" Would be a better title.

[@R3endevous]

you're being too reasonable. Tech youtubers need clickbait

[@ikhyunkim6433]

Upscaling tech is just good stuff. BUT, seems like most of game developing companies give any shoot on optimization. I always wonder why DLSS/FSR options are written in system requirement sheet.

[@ni9274]

They give more FPS for very minor drop in image quality, and since most people don't have 1000€ GPU they will want to use it

[@ikhyunkim6433]

@@ni9274 I think I wrote in wrong way. What I'm saying is Upscaling tech must be left as option, not a requirement.

[@Edgrot]

Stop it is simply put that they are leaving 40 - 45% of gamers out in the cold. How by making their cards obsolete . Now this is a must happen yet to just all of a sudden and a 4060ti at those prices is a huge slap in the face to all those people.

[@papichuckle]

Way more than 45% have a look how many people have a 4080 or 4090. And remember dlss 3 and frame generation is locked to it which ends up being a requirement

[@WarframeCrunch]

Yes it is runing gaming. In new game Robocop effects are kind of a pixelated, and If you turn ON Dlss it looks like DLSS is not upscalling those effects so you get even more pixels. Not to mention that ofcourse DLSS is making game less readable because of DLSS artifacts, not smooth screen, and visible resolution lines.

[@VilasNil]

I think it's a complicated issue. I'm on the side that this is the way to go moving forward as it enables a faster development time, which given the recent trends that games are in such huge scales (which I'm not trully a fan of tbh) that development takes more than half a decade it's a welcome change, BUT I think we're going this direction TOO SOON, the tech to do this isn't here yet at affordable prices to make it not an option. On the one hand, using this tech is alienating most of the consumer base that doesn't have these new and shiny features, which is really anti-consumer, this shouldn't be the new standard until 70-80% of the market has already switched to being capable of running this. On the other hand, GPU designers are spending a lot of resources into developing these technlogies and if they aren't being used they may get dropped or most likely their development will be slowed down.

[@Relativizor]

Baking very much depends on the game. In Overwatch or Remnant II (which doesn't use Lumen) the level design is either entirely static, or pseudo-static with a somewhat limited game space. This allows you to bake lights and consume some extra disk space while doing so. This wont cut it for an open-world title due to disk space, or a world where you have a lot of dynamic changes. You have to compute light in realtime, and this costs a lot of compute. Lumen and Nanite kicks in the door. As a game-dev you now have to choose between making a game which is like your Overwatch or Doom:Eternal being fast-paced and using the usual bag of tricks to get to 120+ FPS. Or you go for higher image quality, which trades off a lot of FPS to do so, but allows you to plug into far more realistic light computation. Both game types can be highly optimized, but how they choose to slice their computation budget is very different. For the latter game type, upscaling is another strong lever you have as a game developer. In many cases, you get better image quality by retaining expensive geometry and light computations and upscaling, than lowering your computational budget. So if your target is something like 30 or 60 fps for a game, then upscaling allows you to shift even more of your computational budget to accuracy.

[@shebeski]

Yes, quality of pixels over quantity. It seems there's a loud and somewhat ignorant cohort of gamers who would rather run ps4 style graphics at 4k. They are mostly about picture clarity over everything else. Realism doesn't matter, nor does atmosphere. Ps4 Spiderman at 4k is what they wanted on Ps5 and they're pissed because they frankly don't notice the immensely improved geometry, lighting and reflections. Spiderman 2 on Ps5 blows away Spiderman on ps4 but some fraction would disagree with you because a native 4k/60 is all they care about. Insanely high texture quality is everything to them

[@Azureskies01]

Yes dlss is still ruining games. As you said if FSR can get to 90-95% of the image quality that DLSS can then devs should never put in DLSS and just make the FSR2 in their game the best looking they can. There is no reason a game dev should spend time on a tech that can only be used by one vendor, at all. Now I still think FSR3 should have gone for the image quality crown but that is getting off topic.

[@MadFaker]

For me I turned on DLSS Quality all the time to get that fps boost and I barely notice anything. DLSS and other Upscaler are good the only problem is devs are so lazy in optimizing their games.

[@Dream_scape47]

No they don't have to make the game twice, all they have to do is add a very advanced graphics settings menu that allow the player to tweak for performance, its very easy and can be achieved in any game engine even UE5.

[@shebeski]

They have to make the LODs and geometry culling which they didn't want to do for Alan wake 2, when all you have to do is own a card that's 6 years or newer.

[@justjoe5373]

We're seeing the cusp between 2 techs. We've mastered rasterization, but have only touched all this new stuff with upscaling and ray tracing (and let's mention frame generation). The graph is called Gartner hype graph or something like that, I think you should look it up Vex. We're at the plateau of rasterization and have only relatively recently hit the trigger for upscaling and ray tracing. The thing is, the plateau of new tech is gonna be higher than that of rasterization, but the trigger is lower, and the inflated hype is through the roof. Combine this with AAA devs being run by people who haven't played a game in 10 years and only see gaming as #1 money printer and with gamers not exactly being known for being a welcoming bunch that embraces big change, and you get this awkward phase where we are now TL:DR We need to wait for the transition from rasterization to new tech to happen and then we're gonna see it smoothed over with upscaling. Then upscaling and ray tracing are gonna be the new requirement

[@DKaldes]

DLSS isn't ruining games. It was meant to improve your fps while making the game look better. FSR might be the thing that ruined games because it made the technology available to everyone, and thus developers can relay on it.

[@Unprotected1232]

Remember Crysis back in 2007? We didn't have upscalers to fall back on. We PC gamers had to swallow our pride and run the game in potato mode.

[@skykill111]

I'm not upset about the new technology change the way game render, it's truly impressive. What I DO upset about is that the company such as NVIDIA is feature the hardware component that work with these at a ridiculous pricing. And another thing to upset is that the game dev generally relying on upscaling too much, when technically speaking upscaling technology is still on it early stage. Take ARK ascended for example, world strongest gaming computer that had an i9-13900k/14900k with an RTX 4090 and the game still run like piece of crap without upscaling. They're basically think that with the upscaler technology, they can just throw in every think they think it's ideal for their game without actually thinking that optimization still exist. Upscaling is nice, but making game without need to think how well it would run (even on very modern and good hardware) meaning that upscaling technology isn't ready to be the core of developing games.

[@emerson-biggons7078]

A fix for real time rendering in my opinion could be a reintroduction of sliders. Before we had a choice between low medium and high quality static assets. But those are gone in favour of real time rendering options that automate that. However it is currently just stuck at the highest setting of that by default. What things like nanite and ray tracing could do is at set performance targets and scale up and down the level of detail based on those targets. Like Dynamic resolution scaling but for rays and lod of models. This way instead of the details being lower only because your hardware literally can't make them any higher and running at 30fps. It doesn't make them the highest possible quality, instead compromising it to push back up to 60 in real time.

[@d34d10ck]

Performant raytracing wouldn't be possible at all without DLSS. That's where upscaling, frame generation and ray reconstruction becomes really important.

[@dontmatter4423]

0:24 "...i barely got any change in fps whatsoever" BRO GOT LITERALLY 2X JUMP IN PERFORMANCE

[@infernal-toad]

As someone who likes seeing pixels on my screen when not playing in native resolution. I prefer that to upscaling because with DLSS enabled I don’t see the pixels anymore and I feel like pixels are charming. AI ruins that.

[@Kiritomens]

I really can't get used to this playing PC games since i was a baby. I recently thought: hey i just upgraded my PC i should go and play cyberpunk now, should run pretty okay right?. Ran about 40 FPS in intense areas with RTX reflections off, but lighting on. Rest on ultra no DLSS. So i started turning down settings for things like volumetric clouds and such. I could not see a single difference in the clouds or my FPS. I just turned on DLSS quality, and played the game around 60 FPS in intense areas, and had a good time. But it annoys the fuck out of me that the settings basically do fuck all outside off RTX, upscaling, and frame generation. Imagine a game like Crysis dropped nowadays, but everyone could only play on ultra at 15FPS lol.

[@vism0k]

It's outrageous that games NEED upscaling to work nowadays, specially ones that genuinely don't look that different from games from a few years prior that ran buttery smooth without any of those technologies, its insane that in such a short amount of time we're being forced to upgrade so quickly just because of these cheap techniques that game companies use to avoid putting resources and time into proper optimization, eugh.

[@jandraelune1]

There are some options that have to remain no matter the path taken. Motion blur: can trigger motion sickness and should be off by default. This is not about visual quality, this is about player health. Bloom: this is usualy overdone and washes out scenes. This can hurt those that are at a degree of light sensitivity, touch much light and its blinding. God rays: this is just extra eye candy. Lens flare: >< Why devs, this is a visual effect that ONLY happens when a light source is viewed through a digital lense. Unless you're viewing through a camera in the scene, this just should not be in at all. Fog: this is one setting that cripples frame rates, some titles have moved to having fog with zero ways to turn it off. AA (Anti-Aliasing): this setting hits frame rates hard, but recent titles, namely ones that use upscaling have literally zero way to turn this off. Shadows: for a long time hit the frame rates hard, but recently this has come down, but can still be a problem in more open and cluttered areas.

[@isaidicanshout]

“I want photorealistic graphics with beautiful lighting and reflection!” “Boohoo why do I have to upscale this game??”

[@GamerErman2001]

What I don't like is when games only have FSR and no option for DLSS. They should offer DLSS, FSR and XeSS so that everyone can use the best upscaler that their GPU can support.

[@topbanana.2627]

I completely forgot DLSS 3.5 was a thing, and I was playing away on cyberpunk on a 4090 on basically max settings (under psycho) i saw a youtube short talking about DLSS 3.5 so I decided to try it now. So previously, I was running at around 70 fps on 4k, when I turned DLSS 3.5 on, I was running 100 fps, at 4k, at the highest settings possible. Its crazy

[@Bino-hy5bl]

The problem with light baking is that some big scenes or even medium sized scenes can't be baked, because they're too big to fit on anyone GPU memory, so some games even more the ones with large maps (like Cyberpunk) can't rely on lightmapping for lighting up the city, etc. so they need to rely on realtime graphics lighting systems to achieve good looking graphics, and that's why NVIDIA work with CD Projekt Red to test and use the new Ray Tracing graphics stuff they develop, because Cyberpunk 2077 is the perfect example of a game with the worst-case scenario for lighting, where neither baked lighting or rasterized graphics are good enough.

[@theransomgamer]

A cookie that is backed in short time will never taste like the one that is backed in time that is actually required to make it taste how it should be.

[@OGBouncin94]

Optimization isn't really a thing anymore, DLSS/FSR/FG will be a requirement in 3 - 5 years

[@crookim]

Thanks to these new demanding games I don't have to change my 1080p display even after upgrading my GPU😂

[@BluD]

DLSS was a blessing and a curse. when used properly its pretty good but yeah a lot of devs are using it as a way to skip optimizing their games.

[@oaj1502]

the problem is that companies are taking their games to a level that only the top percentiles of players can actually run. instead of better optimizing the game and making sure everything is good before release, they instead cut corners and just rely on dlss and fsr to boost performance which leaves a lot of regular gamers in a tough spot just to run the game at even 1440 with medium settings. remember, not everybody has a huge gpu with all these rt cores and dram. i feel like the developers are causes a serious almost power creep with the hardware needed to run your game the way you want. you notice how 4090 and 4080 owners are almost never complaining about anything besides the price. and then gpus are getting huge af and i can only imagine the 50 series gpu sizes

[@H.E.M.]

I don’t mind DLSS but what sucks is that DLSS performance is the only one that actually gives a significant boost in performance.

[@SupraBagels]

Damm, Vex is getting popular af

[@yeezystreetteam]

People can't be that mad. If devs make unplayable games, that's their loss. Don't buy them.

[@GENKI_INU]

Upscaling doesn't even fix optimization issues at the CPU level. There are games where enabling DLSS gets you zero FPS improvement.

[@shodan6401]

Don't know if anyone else has mentioned this, but the DLSS, Ray Tracing, Nanite, Anti Aliasing, Frame Generation, Global Illumination, etc. gives your Fortnight character.... ...a nice butt.

[@quaticus]

upscaling should be a last resort to improve performance in a game, not a prerequisite to get remotely playable performance in a game.

[@LordOfChaos.x]

What i hate is that devs are focusing on pure graphical fidelity while forgeting about gameplay, visibility and graphical consitency. I dont care how realistic your game is. The gameplay, performance and stability along with clever use of color palets is what make a game enjoyable. Take for example Elden Ring.Its not even by 2018 standards a high graphical fidelity game, but it compensates for it with good use of art direction and consistency. I know the game launched with performance issues but they got them fixed resonably quick and on todays patch it can run max settings even on mid range pc builds without struggling.

[@gamerhobbit]

When we look at settings of any game, which was made before these brand-famous upscalers but still with new tech like Dx 11, we can easily see those settings are NOT so much different than FSR/DLSS/XeSS in their underlying logic. Back in the day, lowering a shadow setting actually lowered shadow resolution. Reflection details? Resolution. Lighting quality? Number of the rays per pixel (yes, there are rays even in older technologies, too. They are just not bouncing multiple times), so tied to the resolution. World detail? Switching to lower detailed model which was originally meant for low resolution displaying. Lowering the render resolution is almost equal to dropping all the settings one step down at the same time. New upscalers have two advantages: they can use highest res textures, as long as VRAM allows, and they can cleverly rebuild the final image. I am an admirer of all types of new techniques. But I still believe, a game's ultra settings should aim for actual ultra at an actual luxury resolution at -min- 60FPS with the highest GPU in the market as of its release date. A 4090 owner should be able to play a 2023 game at 4K 60 FPS with an actual render resolution of 3840x2160. Owners of anything lower should have the option to individually adjust settings or use upscalers. Any sane customer should boycott a game which humiliates their 1000++ $ card just because some lazy developers (or some inpatient shareholders) forced a game into release by relying on upscalers in their performance mode. A company may want to get your money without actually respecting you or their own work by simply selling FOMO products but you guys buy your hardware and games with your hard-earned money.

[@potatoglizzy3212]

Using a 4K monitor DLSS is a godsend. Even with a 4090 I'd have to lower all sorts of settings to get a game running comfortably but DLSS saves me from having to configure and compare settings.

[@gvulture1277]

What I hate about upscalers is that they just look like vaseline, combined with forced TAA I just dont want to look at it. I just play old games.