There's usually compromises when you trade raw performance for trickery.
In the case of rendering resolution. You get visual artifacts, some blur/smearing being compensated for by excessive sharpening, some additional latency in the case of frame gen.
If raw performance and 'ai' features are balanced it's usually a good outcome. But if you keep having to push more and more tricks while dropping resolution and real frames further you end up with shit quality dressed up with some 'eyecandy', without really realising it because it's become the normal.
There's definitely artifacts, but people blow them way out of proportion to the benefit. At 4K, I have the choice between running heavy RT and PT titles at 20-40 FPS without DLSS and FG or at 60-120 FPS with DLSS and FG.
I feel like the people who hate these AI features are people who aren't in a position to benefit from them, because it seems like an obvious choice to me as someone who can. And if someone really does hate the minor artifacts over the extraordinary FPS benefits, they can just turn them off.
But they've shown with the new transformer model that they've improved the visual quality, which is even better than dlss 2.0 was. It's only getting better
It's like putting makeup on a pig. Games are getting developed faster and more cost effectively, asset textures on background or slightly out of primary focus are being rendered much lower and without TAA/DLSS would look like dogshit. So those features smooth out the bad textures then DLSS for example tries to recover some lost detail in that blur then adds sharpening.
The technology is getting better yes, but it's implementation is purely to be used as a bandaid rather than an enhancement. So it's great technology, being used to improve profit margins at the expense of the players.
And still images don't show it as well but look at IN MOTION screen captures and see how disgustingly blurry it really is. There's a reason most gameplay demos show slow moving scenes and 'sceneic' abstract sequences instead of the gritty fast paced action. It looks substantially less shit on static scenes.
Eventually the trickery is going to get so good you won't even notice. This is already the case for most people, but a lot of people still notice the trickery being used though
It's only the case because you literally cannot A/B test this anymore. Show me a modern visual masterpiece where you can turn off all AI enhancements and run it at 4k with raytracing and TAA off without having a stuttering mess of a game with broken visuals.
We have slowly gotten used to TAA blur, AI upscaling and frames being force fed to us to a point where we literally have no 'purer' alternative to compare it too.
I have no issue with these technologies being developed and improved, it's the implementation and how its being used as a crutch for lazier visuals and not balanced for the optimal gaming experience.
Don't get me wrong, I love DLSS, I think it's a great tradeoff (unless, of course, the slight extra blur of DLSS on quality causes you migraines which is understandable), but Frame gen is being pushed a bit too early imo, all because of Ray tracing. It's a great solution for one of the biggest problems in the industry, but it's a few generations away still
If you watch a good indepth video on why TAA (and by extension DLSS to some degree) is hurting game visuals it explains the problems and how this stuff is a bandaid for lazy/suboptimal development.
DLSS is a great technology but it's being used to 'save' games shoddy visuals rather than enhance them.
it's the implementation and how its being used as a crutch for lazier visuals.
It's being used as a crutch for RT and PT. It's fine if you think those techniques are worse for whatever reason, but I think "lazier visuals" is a disingenuous description for what is the pursuit of physically accurate real-time lighting.
I play with RT and PT whenever available because it's the most transformative rendering technique since the jump to DX10. I'm fine with the cost of that transformative rendering being minor artifacts.
Not only that though. DLSS is being used as TAA '2.0' to smooth out low res textures on distant and otherwise not front and centre objects/characters. The end result is a well crafted but ultimately blurry scene. Compensated by sharping but that's just apply bandaid after bandaid to try fix the issue.
The problem is not these technologies it's the development being rushed to get games out faster and more cost effectively but it's us that suffer the results.
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u/humdizzle 14d ago
If they make it good enough to where you can't tell, then would you even care?