- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
I’m completely speechless. This looks so terrible I thought it was a joke, but apparently Nvidia released these demos to impress people. DLSS 5 runs the entire game through an AI filter, making every character look like it’s running through an ultra realistic beauty filter.
The photo above is used as the promo image for the official blog post by the way. It completely ignores artistic intent and makes Grace’s face look “sexier” because apparently that’s what realism looks like now.
I wouldn’t be so baffled if this was some experimental setting they were testing, but they’re advertising this as the next gen DLSS. As in, this is their image of what the future of gaming should be. A massive F U to every artist in the industry. Well done, Nvidia.
Yeah, probably the main reason it’s getting the little bit of praise that it does is that they’re showing it off on games with fairly flat-looking skin shaders. Unfortunately a problem with this sort of thing is that getting that “2023” image is the result of giving a whole team a huge amount of time to model one man’s face. If you’re Bethesda and you just want to get NPCs into Starfield, it would be a similar amount of work. A bit less, since the first people already gave a talk on it, but still much more work then just getting a diffuse BRDF with some subsurface scattering and calling it good. But you also need a process that can be applied to every single NPC…
And looking at Striking Distance Studios, the company where that 2023 image is from:
Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that the work those people put in will never be directly reused.
Another reason the DLSS version looks a bit more realistic there is because of the specular highlights on the eyes, for example. They probably aren’t reflecting anything real, or else they would be there in the original. But the AI knows that specular highlights add realism and are plausible in this scene, so it puts them there. That’s something that an artist could do if given a specific shot and camera angle, but in the general case they can’t really do that without causing problems.
There are specular highlights on the eyes in the original, they are just much more subdued.
Oh, yeah, I didn’t see those. I think my point still stands though, really those specular highlights shouldn’t be that bright, but the AI can figure out that it’s plausible for them to be brighter and that it would fit the target style better.