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Finally, the slopware generation
Being young today must be fun. Just missed out on all the good stuff in the 80, 90s and 2000s to experience this mess we have now.
I was hanging out with my neighbour a few months back. When I listed off how fucked kids today are....
Then I remembered he has two young boys and they're growing up with this dystopia as their present and future.
I apologised once I realized his family is directly affected.
He said "Oh I already know they're fucked."
Well, somewhat good news: The best stuff of the times is generally still available, often legally for cheap, or even cheaper otherwise. As long as you aren't purist about original copies on original hardware.
You forgot the 2010s, where all the online services were amazing. Well, until Harambe marked the downfall.
I find it interesting that the AI parts of the video have very little video in them. They have the original game moving along, and then they show the AI version and mostly keep it as a still. I suspect that they did this so that you can't do a side-by-side comparison and see that the AI version doesn't actually play as well as the original version.
Also, I've got to wonder about how it must feel to be an artist who worked on one of these games, and watch the thing you carefully hand-tuned to match the artistic vision of the game design be replaced by the mindless addition of wrinkles.
Personally, I don't know much about this technology. That said, I've heard that the original purpose of DLSS was to improve gaming performance, give you more FPS, and so on.
In that sense, many—myself included—are wondering: How is this slop generator going to improve game performance? How is giving Grace from RE9 a totally different face with make up on going to improve my gaming experience?
All of this upscaling when it was presented over a decade ago was to give older cards a longer lease in life and now it's morphed into the mandatory way to get a stable framerate since developers can now just rely on DLSS and to a lesser extent FSR to get them to a acceptable framerate instead of optimization.
As for how will this improve the gaming experience? I honestly don't see it at this point. Back when it was the original goal, sure, now with this "Chat GPT moment for graphics", I see it only beneficial for corporate parasites and "shareholder value" as we wave good bye to artistic vision as everything goes to looking like AI only fans.
Saves payroll on artists which means more profits. #winning
It makes "I fixed this ugly FEMALE character" chuds happy and that's what matters to them.
Not a fan of reimagined stuff of any sort, it usually doesn't hit well. But from a tech standpoint I can think of ways one could use the tech to improve game performance for new games. Usually making a game run faster or feel more realistic is all about fooling the player, not drawing what's not seeable, showing hints of things that aren't really there. Hell, that's been true for movies and even stage, right?
So my thought on how this could work is to have the actual core models be lower polys, enough for details but not as high as the best we've seen done, and minimal texturing. Then the generator uses that as a base to form the image it puts over the top. Still don't see how that can be done that fast, but apparently we're there now.
The problem I see is consistency. Whatever the AI generates for a given source won’t be consistent throughout the game. Even in the original Digital Foundry video, you can see how Grace’s face looks like a totally different person depending on the distance from which it’s viewed.
The artistic style is supposed to solve that consistency issue, but this AI is ruining it.
(Also, in the same video, you can see they were using two 5090s to run the DLSS 5 games, so...)
Nvidia DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sloppificator)
Easy to avoid nvidia products these days anyway. Overpriced, marginal performance over AMD, and tied to AI slop globally. Never been so easy to vote with your wallet.
I think Jensen said during a presentation a long time ago that a long term goal was to have graphics being entirely generated. This seems like a big step towards that.
Never cared for realism in games to begin with, so don't particularly care to comment on how it looks, but I've been thinking that I genuinely find it creepy.
Not just Uncanny Valley material, but also having these faces stare at you, always fully lit, it just gives me the creeps, kind of like a panopticon situation.
I don't fucking know, if that's my own trauma playing into that, where for the longest time, people looking at me generally meant they're about to bully me.
But either way, I'm about to head to bed and genuinely feel like there's a 20% chance I'll have a mild nightmare from that shit.
This whole AI craze has been a wild ride of all kinds of nightmare fuel, from depictions with missing/additional limbs to the weirdest warping of objects+limbs in those fucking generated videos. And the worst part is that some folks seem to just not see it or not want to see it, so they keep using the nightmare generators.
I guess by this description that perhaps it would be good for something like resident evil that strives to give you that uncanny creepiness no?
They don't care. Nobody thinks this is a meaningful announcement, it's just another pretense to justify AI as Nvidia and much of the entire US economy are so deeply sunken-cost invested in the "future AI ecosystem" that they just need any headlines to keep the machine churning. That's what this is. Doesn't mean it isn't real and gamers won't have to suffer with it, but no point of this is actually to make anyone's gaming experience better in any way.
The upside of enshitification in newer games and crap like this is that i am less interested in playing the new stuff and the more so enjoy replaying older games.
Which also run at peak performance.
Aren’t video games Art? Why does nvidia think it knows better than the artists? . And maybe I am the only one, but DLSS has never made any of my games look better ever. It’s always looked worse, and I now permanently turn that shit off and regret spending a 20 percent higher price for something I don’t use. I don’t usually agree with IGN articles, but this one hits it on the head.
Nvidia is a Slap in the Face
Fixed
It's crazy to watch these developers march everyone's jobs, including their own off a cliff.
Who gives a fuck? I can play your game "as intended" or my way. Mods make games awesome!
If someone wants to play with AI slop mode fully enabled, that's their choice and their prerogative and I'm assuming they bought the game so how about they just enjoy it however the hell they want to.
From brain rot to slop. The word of the year, everybody.
Business folks calling the shots over the artists cut back their hours and insist they let the slop generator make up the difference.
Every corner that can be cut to make running the business cheaper does get cut, and this is a pretty big possibility of corners to cut. It's worthwhile to adamantly express the market for quality work.
And there's still people who think this is a good thing and an evolution in graphics. You can guess what their political alignments are pretty quickly.
The guess would be entirely wrong, of course, but I can sense that has never stopped you before.
If you don't think gen AI is a fascist technology and praise it then i'm fairly certain that putting you in the fascist box is correct.
Lol. I am as far from fascist as one can get. Based on your answer, I don't believe you even know what fascism is.
If you knew what it was you'd understand that gen AI is such thing. It steals the intellectual power of others to create dumbed down slop with the goal of making the general public less educated and reliant on it. It's a trap made by technofascist billionaires to keep the masses from taking all of their heads, and this administration just happens to be all in on that too, using it for surveillance to disappear minorities and political opponents.
I disagree with multiple assertions you've made. It doesn't steal anything. Neither does it have a goal. People using it may steal, and those with the most successful products may have goals - but that's not the technology. This is like saying guns are fascist. Or cars are fascist. Or phones are fascist.
It's a tool, and like any tool, the motive and ethics of it's use is directly attributable to the user, not the tool.
The motive and ethics are from the tech companies that created them. Those are the ones with technofascist aspirations.
Some, yes, not all. No one company created the technology. You can't use a blanket accusation to condemn all forms of machine learning just because Altman (OpenAI), Zuckerberg (Meta) and Elon Musk are obvious fascists, and they're championing the technology. Call them out specifically, it's more effective than "all AI bad."
I'm specifically talking about LLMs and generative AI. Those are NOT the same as machine learning because they don't learn anything, they're text predictive algorithms that were given infinite amounts of resources.
And? They're still tools. They exist. They can be used for things other than fascism. Just today I used an LLM to determine the area of a plot of land from a satellite photograph. I used generative AI to create a phone wallpaper background that matched my phone case.
Did the fascists gain power over me?
Do you think it have been better if I spent my time manually measuring the area, determining the math, and calculating the area of land? Should I have made an inferior version of the wallpaper manually?
If you think so, you must have more time and creative talent than me. Enjoy your privilege, but don't shame those without.
I used an LLM to determine the area of a plot of land from a satellite photograph.
I don't think that's possible unless the LLM has access to the satellite to mile ratio. Likely an hallucination.
I used generative AI to create a phone wallpaper background that matched my phone case.
Stealing from artists 🙄
you must have more time and creative talent than me.
Art is not about talent, it's about continuous, rigorous training and improvement over years. It's not a privilege. You can literally pick up a pencil and some paper and draw right now. It's not something that is somehow inaccessible, hell I've seen a furry artist draw an anthro dragoness pin up with nothing but a burning stick and a rock. Also, there's people out there that are completely paralyzed that can paint with their mouths. There's millions of pictures in the internet that you could find to match your phone case that weren't made with a plagiarism machine.
I don't think that's possible unless the LLM has access to the satellite to mile ratio. Likely an hallucination.
It did. The screenshot was from Google Maps which had the scale in the corner. I tried searching for a Google Maps plugin that offered the same functionality, but I couldn't find any that would let me free form draw a shape on the map. So I took a screenshot, drew a red shape, and gave it to Gemini. It showed me all the steps it was going through, the math looked legit and seemed realistic to me.
Stealing from artists 🙄
How is it stealing from an artist? No artist created it. This is even less like stealing than downloading pirated films. In both cases, no one lost anything. Are you arguing that had I not had access to generative AI that I would have sought out and paid someone to craft a wallpaper for me? I would not have. I'd just use some free art online. Where is the theft? Are you saying someone, somewhere already created my exact wallpaper? Shall I upload it, and you can tell me where it already exists and I could have purchased it?
Art is not about talent, it's about continuous, rigorous training and improvement over years.
Yes, time. I don't have those years. I spent my years studying machine learning instead.
Weird... I like this and see this as a bonus to uplifting old games.
So what's my political alignment?
How, precisely, would this "uplift old games"?
Are you suggesting that their rights holders should commission some game devs to update their old titles to add support for DLSS5? Where's the value proposition in that?
I think it will likely be able to be injected into any game that already supports DLSS. I wish that list was longer, but perhaps someone will create a wrapper so it works with any executable. Then it could work on older games and emulators. Preferably with tuning adjustments so you can find the sweet spot you're looking for.
No one cares about old games looking realistic and if you do you should probably look for modern games instead.
操你妈!Not only making their video cards beyond fucking reach than it was, it's clear that old man is going for the moneybags.
To be honest it looks great and at first I thought about how impressive it is.
Then you think about how it modifies what was created and how it could lack consistency with a character looking a certain way in a part of the game and differently later.
I don’t know know what to think about these technologies like FSR and DLSS..
I don’t think I mind the fake frames as it could give you more performance on something like a Steam Deck, but the rest is tricky..
The magic here is you always have the option in most game settings, to turn it off.
The problem is that these 'features' give you the fake appearance of performance but at the cost of actual performance. And they aren't even good in the first place. Upscaling is like smearing vaseline all over your screen and saying "see how good it looks" when it's just a blurry mess, especially with temporal elements. Frame generation gives artificial smoothness but doesn't help input latency which is the part of frame rate that actually matters.
The kicker is that it costs real frames to generate fake ones. The game ends up looking and feeling worse.
I dislike upscaling, it always looks off to me and frequently causes edges of things to be weird kind of like aliasong but different. After upgrading from a gtx 3060, where I only used it for a few games that were hectic enough to not notice it as much, to a 9070xt I turned off upscaling globally and run everything in the native resolution. Games look so much better without dlss or fsr to me, fewer weird artifacts causing distractions.
I'll take 20 less fps to not constsntly feel like something is off even if I can't point out exactly what it is.
I am not completely against this technology if it can be used to 'remaster' older games.
In the current climate of rising hardware prices, it just seems unnecessary and tone-deaf to introduce such tech that requires not one, but TWO top of the line GPUs to run.
Yes, Nvidia is hugely into AI and machine learning, but they might be known as slopvidia soon if the keep forcing this stuff on gamers and developers.
If this could be applied to games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, System Shock 2, Soldier of Fortune, Medal of Honour, Tron 2.0, Call of Duty and all other titles from that era, I would not mind in the slightest.
A man can dream...
Well the last time that was done we ended up with the GTA trilogy mess with AI upscaling/remastering.
I mean, the entirety of DLSS, and Realtime Raytracing, has been an ongoing insult to the more technical aspects of game engine design snd optimization.
Now everyone else can experience the level of disgust that people who've been figuring out all kinds of tricks and hacks that become either a 'secret sauce' or an industry standard rendering method, that those people have been experiencing since Nvidia started this whole mess.
Howabout we just figure out a more effective and also faster way to do AA, eh?
You know, not go down the TAA branch of the tech tree, that lead us to where we are now?
Oh or hey, howabout this:
Actually improve NPC AI in video games, decision making / behavior models, maybe a little submodule on a GPU that's optimized to run some kind of standardized genetic learning algo data format, or maybe figure out a way to do Goal Oriented Action Planning in the shader buffer, somehow, you know the kind of AI that's so awesome in FEAR?
Considering that DLSS and DLAA are, and I would image that the FSR equivalents are too, separate processes so they could drop DLSS and just concentrate on DLAA. But that's not where the money and ray tracing is, and part of that is also on gamers in general since there's always such a focus on FPS, something that even I'm guilty of, and not visual quality.

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