In recent years, AI Upscaling techs like DLSS and FSR gained a lot of popularity. By using Artificial Intelligence, people could boost performance on their games without having to get more powerful components.

But... There's something off about all that. After watching one of NVidia's trailers for the new DLSS 4, I noticed people getting upset about a particular thing at the video.

See if you can spot it by yourself:

You probably noticed it, but watch how the game runs at amazing 340+ FPS with DLSS 4. That's neat, of course, but if you look closer, before using DLSS, the game was kinda struggling to keep 60+ FPS... On an RTX 5090.

So, that raises a question... What if the AI Upscaling wasn't to be an option in the game?

I think either we'll had to upgrade our RIGs to the most powerful GPU on the market, or... Maybe the companies would have to actually do some work and optimize the titles so we could run it without having to rely on AI Upscaling.

What do you think?

Yeah AI has become something of a crutch for developers too lazy to optimize their games for a decent resolution.

So many games on PS5 use aggressive upscaling from very low resolutions and it looks like shit. I'd go so far as to say games on PS3/360 actually have better image quality than a lot of current gen games cos those were at least relatively clean due to less post-processing and reconstruction.

When like 90% of PS4 games were 1080p, there is no excuse for games on much more powerful hardware to be upscaling from sub-900p.

Yes. Why wouldn't companies try to cut costs like this if they can? The only incentive they have is customer unhappiness, but customer unhappiness doesn't seem to be too great, so in practice they can just ignore it. Some companies care about their reputation more, but big publishers probably didn't get big by worrying about their reputation more than they absolutely had to.

Absolutely! The overwhelming majority of games can not run in any sort of acceptable condition if some kind of AI tech isn’t being utilized. Even then it’s not a guarantee.

It’s so rapidly become the norm that everyone is awestruck at how well optimized Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is even without any sort of upscaling tech used at all. Performance purely depends on your hardware power, which is how it should be. Even to the point 8+ year old tech still runs the game incredibly well!

I don't want any of it. Give me options for lower native resolution to hit frame rate goals over any AI. PSSR doesn't work as well as advertised to or some devs can't make it work, it's hit or miss. Idk if DLSS is like that or not but going from 60 to 350, I'll belive it when I see it in person and judge the image quality. If they are going to rely on this in the 10th gen it needs to work so much better than it does now cause this gen is a disaster, not just because of this, the engines are shite and devs are getting lazy with to much power I'd assume but I'm not sold on it getting rid of the problems that arise from it. Not to mention MH Wilds are pushing frame gen for people on lower hardware with no blocks for people who'll ruin their image completely to get fps and they'll get used to it, not everyone has high end hardware and medium hardware is like the new lower end hardware so it'll just be a case of people getting used to janky image quality cause fps goes up and that's what I fear the most going forward. There just isn't enough people complaining about it, I don't even think many people realise, they know it looks jank and it makes them sick but they don't know the terms to point it out and complain to devs about it. Millions of people played BM Wu Kong on PS5 and no back lash for the disaster of image quality. Smdh.

Yes. This completely and to the other person who mentioned KCD2, they got thar by setting a graphical goal and not stretching. It looks like PS4 PRO game and that's okay. Graphics got good enough, now focus on stuff on screen, frame rate and particle effects over nonsense detail like the tiny hairs on peoples face. It'll save money and put the recourses to better use, games will be made in reasonable time frames like 3 or 4 years and not something stupid like 8 years and maybe the industry won't go in the toilet. Fingers crossed Ghost of Yotei goes full on particle effects and artstlye like GoT and is applauded for it to make an example of what should be done. 

Yes, just like VRR was before it.

It started with the PS3/360. Upscaling to 'fill the gap'. Can't optimize / reach the target framerate, lower render resolution.

https://granturismo.forumfree.it/?t=69816806

Lots of PS3/360 titles upscaled from sub 720p while hiding scaling artifacts under a lot of blur.


I guess PS4 was the high fidelity generation... for 1080p TVs anyway.

The chase for 4K has ironically only lowered render resolutions...

Predictable since higher resolutions (or rather bigger screen size) demand higher fps. While the consumer still demands next-gen graphics. Increase resolution + Increase FPS + Increase detail + Next-gen lighting + Ray traced reflections, it's asking too much of the smaller hardware jumps we get nowadays.

Consoles are limited by AMD Radeon technology.

nVidia is spending transistors that could be used for more RT Cores and CUDA cores for Tensor cores to do upscaling.
We have reached a point of diminishing returns in GPU technology, so we need to "cheat" our way to the top... And nVidia is simply the best at that currently.

Console developers also don't seem to be building their games and technology for the target hardware these days, but will now build their games for "future consoles" by deploying dynamic resolutions, framerates and other features.

Upscaling itself, at least DLSS, is fairly solid - there are some games where it has some nasty artifacts (like Indiana Jones, so even TAA looks better), but for the most part it can be useful (at least on Quality setting). Frame gen on the other hand is, from my POV, pure nonsense, since actual responsiveness is same (or even worse) than without it for the "benefit" of some fake interjected frames.

Nvidia isn't a graphics company anymore but a ML(I refuse to call it AI) company.

But to still sell to gamers they need to make a market spin so people gobble it up at $2400 per card.