While technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR dramatically improve the performance of games by generating pixels and frames with artificial intelligence, some say upscaling technologies are a playground for allowing developers to release unoptimized games. However, Nvidia disagrees with this view; The company says it plans to focus on DLSS and AI for the foreseeable future.In a lengthy discussion of DLSS and ray tracing technology, Nvidia says the industry will eventually move beyond running games at native resolution. The company sees resolution upgrades as a way to work smarter rather than harder.
The future will be DLSS, FSR and XeSS
Solutions like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS significantly increase frame rates while minimizing image quality loss, but some users feel that manufacturers and game developers are using these tools as an escape route. Remnant II, for example, set a dangerous precedent by listing system requirements that assumed players were using upgrades.
A while ago, an in-depth interview was held with Nvidia and CDProjekt Red about the recently introduced DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction feature and the new path tracing update for Cyberpunk 2077. Nvidia’s road map was also mentioned in the interview.
Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of Applied Deep Learning Research at Nvidia, said that due to DLSS, rendering at native resolution is no longer best for image or graphics quality. He even emphasized that DLSS 3.5 offers better visuals than native resolution in some scenes. Nvidia and CDPR argue that pathing fundamentally changes Cyberpunk’s presentation and that it would be impossible without DLSS. Indeed, even the RTX 4090 could not reach 30 FPS at 4K when path tracing was active.Upgrading technologies will continue to be the main focus
According to Catanzaro, native resolution is a bit like using brute force. Graphics rendering has always been full of “tricks” like mipmapping and Detail Level, say Catanzaro and CDPR’s Jakub Knapik. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that Moore’s Law no longer works, so it makes sense for Nvidia to start moving away from “workhorse” power.Additionally, it is necessary to read these comments considering Nvidia’s heavy investments in the artificial intelligence sector and the high profit amount it earns from it. However, upscaling technologies also alleviate performance concerns, allowing developers to create scenes that would otherwise be impossible. Of course, there will be those who use this to avoid optimization. However, we need to look at the future rather than the present.
It’s a fact that many major PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X games upscale from resolutions below 4K, often using FSR. When they reach native 4K, it usually happens at 30 fps. This behavior predates the advent of 4K displays and AI-based upscaling. Games from previous PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 eras often struggled to reach 1080p. The claim that artificial intelligence techniques have improved developers’ ability to compensate for differences in pixel counts is not unfounded.
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