Yes I know what an SDK is.

But it actually has very little to do with optimization.

An SDK is essentially just a package of libraries (and often complimentary tools) with docs on the proper usage of APIs, header files you can link to when compiling and depending on whether it's closed or open source you may also get the actual implementation code or in the case of closed source - you get .DLLs or .so files to Dynamically link against and the .DLL provides APIs via header files for you to talk to.

While I'm very happy that FSR is open source and now devs can fork it and create modifications to the actual implementation to suit their needs (presuming the license allows, haven't checked), I do wonder whether this kind of tech is the electron of desktop apps, if you catch my out of memory exception.

That pushing them, making them more available, will only lead to neglecting real optimization techniques, and an over-reliance on upscalers. I don't see how making upscalers more available will as you put it:

less of a problem.

In fact, you confirmed my fears right here:

People use this because when it is implemented well, it can actually be used in ways that make it so the whole game does not have to be built around depending on only having a high end GPU.

This is the entire problem. It looks like ass. You don't need much beyond an RTX 3090 to run mostly every game on ultra. GPUs are very cheap nowadays compared to the crypto boom era circa 2020.

Well implemented, poorly implemented - it does not matter in the slighest.

FXAA, FSR, DLSS, and godforbid - TAA, are all a smeary mess that ruins visual clarity and makes games broadly unappealing no matter how good the underlying assets are.

This release could potentially accelerate the success folks have already been having at getting FSR4 to run on older, cheaper 7000 series AMD cards.

The only things those cards should be running is the same DVD of The Office on repeat in a retirement home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Or idk, running some l33t riced out Linux distro with 10 different levels of transparency.

What they should not be doing is be used as an excuse for stagnating real time graphics, which if it becomes an industry standard leading to an overall decline of the art form as we have already seen with how much better games that implemented normal anti-aliasing methods like MSAA (or even SMAA as a fallback performant option) look.

FrameGen and Upscaling can be very good things when games are made by people who know how to use them correctly, instead of relying on them as a crutch to cover the lack of ootimizations from their 'high speed low drag' development practices.

They really can't be implemented in any way that will make them ever preferable to native. And don't be so naive, you know exactly what all this shit is for - it's to make games sell more.

Shiny game = more sales = $$$

Back in the day this was done by just having the game run like shit. All the screenshots look good - and when you're not playing, you don't feel the impact of the framerate so much.

This goes way back to the N64, try playing the XBLA remastered GoldenEye on Xenia with mouse support - it is so much better - you'll never want to go back.

Makes you wonder why didn't they just make the game look worse, and actually run at an enjoyable framerate?

Well, they did this because shiny game sells better, whether you're looking at trailers or screenshots in magazines, PS1 games looked like shit (including because the console didn't have a hardware z-buffer and so jittered all over the place and relied on devs to implement sorting tables instead for ordering depth), so having top-end graphics was an easy selling point for N64 games.

Eventually they started making trailers that were just unrelated CGI, sometimes outsourced to a random CGI sweatshop in India, but people caught on and the industry switched to "in-engine", which was marginally more honest.

FSR, DLSS, etc is the latest version of this same trick. You can't really see the smear in gameplay trailers thanks to the YouTube's 2009 jpeg-ass compression algo that people think is 1080p when it looks worse than a late 90s DVD, so graphics can be turned up to 11, then when you get the game it turns out your options are either to run it at 480p upscaled to 1080 and have it look like some crusty ass letsplay, or at a native res, but at 15FPS, which will be mostly generated of course.

Hyperbole - yes. But also truth.

Video games are art. They're also a crazy technical achievement a lot of the time, I played TLOU Part 2 on PC recently, with DLAA at actually native 1440p and just... Wow! It was like that one tree from Uncharted 3 all over again, shit looked like real life. Once you turn the stupid sharpening off at least. Now play it on PS4 and it looks like whenever they'd show a woman close up on Star Trek: The Original Series.

It also made me sad because there wasn't an option not to have this smeary DLAA shit, even if MSAA was available, the shimmering of e.g. hair or guitar strings or other thin objects that was never accounted for by devs because it would be covered up by the smear.

its just a shame, I love that game to death (I like weird games) and so I'd want to come back to it in 20 years and run it with 8x MSAA at 4K and be blown away all over again, just like I'd do today with Return to Castle Wolfenstein or something, but instead, it'll be forever aged and tarnished by this crap, because it made it look slightly shinier on release and made it sell better. Ka-ching.

Sidenote: I'm not a professional dev or game dev, I only have a passing knowledge of graphics because I'm too smoothbrain for math. I may be wrong. Feel free to correct me.