Nvidia Reveals AI Supercomputer Used Non-Stop For Six Years To Perfect Gaming Graphics (pcgamer.com) 22
Nvidia has dedicated a supercomputer running thousands of its latest GPUs exclusively to improving its DLSS upscaling technology for the past six years, a company executive revealed at CES 2025. Speaking at the RTX Blackwell Editor's Day in Las Vegas, Brian Catanzaro, Nvidia's VP of applied deep learning research, said the system operates continuously to analyze failures and retrain models across hundreds of games.
Money well spent (Score:1)
NVIDIA: Spends millions of dollars refining graphics technology by analyzing games.
Game industry: Actively imploding under the weight of development costs for those graphics [slashdot.org]
Indie developers: Makes games with minimalist graphics
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> isn't forcing the AAA Gaming industry to chase the magic dragon that is "the best" cutting edge graphic
Never implied that was the case.
It's just ironic that NVIDIA has been spending all these resources on improving a technology that is poised to be in increasingly less demand. AAA spending on graphics is likely to shrink, and much of indie game developers never really needed it in the first place.
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DLSS is one of these ways that game developers get cheaper 'good' results. Can skip a lot of optimization if you don't have to render at full resolution. So actually, this is exactly that enables those less spending companies.
As an example, it is rumored that Nintendo - which is not known for state of the art graphics - will make heavy use of DLSS in the upcoming Switch 2
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DLSS makes games look a lot worse. There's a reason why it's only ever compared to TAA smeared screenshots in promotional materials, never full motion without TAA vomit. Because it looks so bad, that comparing it to non-TAA smeared images immediately demonstrates how much worse it is.
The reason to use DLSS is if your game is horrifically poorly optimized (a lot of shovelware made on unreal 5 is in this category) and you don't have time to optimize. You just say "run it with upscaling and fake frames", pop m
Re:Game graphics are not the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
No one's required to neuter their art so it doesn't make you feel bad. Don't like the game? Don't buy it.
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Indeed. Concord, Veilguard, and current woke developer whinefest about "gaming spending is up, and less than fifth is on new games where we're overrepresented, how can this be?!" are a proof that your advice is being followed.
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What are some of these woke games?
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Concord, Veilguard and Dustborn come to mind as recent hundred million plus development cost examples. Heck, Outlaws showed that even Star Wars franchise can't carry wokeness to profitability.
But in general, there's a massive whining event ongoing on X right now by woke developers that "gaming spending has grown massively, and almost none of it is being spent on new games, and pretty much all new games spending is not on woke games resulting in third year of layoffs at woke gaming companies. How can this be
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That's not a them problem, that's a you problem. No one is forcing you to play games you don't enjoy.
The Hell With Actual Frames Then? (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:The Hell With Actual Frames Then? (Score:4, Informative)
No, temporal reconstruction isn't going anywhere. If you're not using DLSS or FSR, you're probably using TAA, which is kind of the same thing (just worse), and if you're not using TAA, you probably don't have any anti-aliasing. And you're going to see similar techniques used in more and more places. Denoising raytracing and ray bounce caching, for example. Or infill for reprojection for reducing latency, something that is already at basically 100% usage with VR.
DLSS-type techniques are just way better at temporal reconstruction and denoising than previous techniques, they're now common on game consoles (FSR on Xbox and Playstation, PSSR on Playstation, soon DLSS on Switch 2), and will eventually be ubiquitous and probably borderline mandatory.
Re:The Hell With Actual Frames Then? (Score:4, Informative)
For those that don't understand what this is about. Temporal smoothing of everything allows developers to hide a tremendous amount of crap under the horribly smoothed appearance and artifacts. This is especially true for UE5 games, where if you turn off TAA or DLSS, you'll see horrible visual artifacts that temporal smoothing hid.
It's why other forms of anti-aliasing are increasingly removed. They don't hide all the horribleness like TAA and DLSS does. This is also why DLSS marketing materials are pretty much always "compare to TAA image" rather than "original image". It would reveal that original is either words better because it's designed correctly without massive amounts of artifacts, or alternatively that it's way worse because it shows all the artifacts.
The memes of people posting screenshots from old games like MGS5 and asking "why does this look better than most of the modern UE5 games" is universally answered "TAA and DLSS and other temporal smoothing that is used to hide shitty and buggy design features by presenting a smoothed out, horrible looking image compared to old sharp looking games".
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Oh, it's even worse. They're now advocating for straight up inserting multiple fake frames to give an illusion of smooth gameplay to avoid optimizing games. DLSS3 was just one fake frame between real ones, DLSS4 is multiple fake frames.
We're about to have really choppy game play that looks "smooth" because of all the fake frames posted on top of the 24FPS cinematic experience underneath them.
I have an idea (Score:1)
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Steam hardware survey reveals that overwhelming majority of gamers is still on 1080, with small minority being on 1440, and almost no one on 4k.
But Steam's sales numbers according to presentation that just went viral on X reveal that it alone is bigger than entire PC gaming market was just a few years ago, and only a small fraction of spending on steam is going towards new games. Turns out people don't buy woke, TAA smoothed slop, and instead spend on older games.
There's a lot of butthurt on the topic of "w