ummm... pls

imo upscaling is good but devs shouldnt use it as an excuse to skip optimizing games

Remember when GPUs used to effortlessly run new games without upscaling and costing a fortune? Good times

To me, it seems like a step backwards. It is clear that the technology is still in its early stages and is not yet optimized. This, however, is not a valid excuse for game developers to neglect proper optimization of their games. These features should be considered a last resort rather than the go-to solution.

Is dlss ruining games? No. Are devs ruining games? No. Are publishers ruining games? Yes.

IMHO, if the hardware is not ready for RT and other fancy fearures, they should remain in a tech demo realm. Upscaling sounded like a cool thing 4 years ago, but now, because of it (and the frame gen) nVidia, and AMD are trying to sell us slow GPU for the price of a higher tier one, while game devs (or rather publishers) are using it as THE performance optimization technique. While it is somewhat passible in Alan Wake 2, as the game looks really good, in Starfield it is not, as the graphics aren't amaising.

When these upscalers were introduced I thought it would increase the life of lower-end gfx cards. Instead, it replaced optimization. You shouldn't need a 4090 to run a game at 1080p 30fps!

While I largely/mostly agree with your opinions and observations, we all have noticed a serious performance degradation of many (not all) games over the past 2-3 years without necessarily providing increased visual fidelity. We have numerous game examples of that in our basket already. I still argue that a large majority of game studios still omit much needed optimisations in the name of $$$; and this will backfire at them all.

What's the point in real time lighting/shadows over baked on everything, when mostly everything is static. I see the benefit if the game has day/night cycles.

As a amd graphics card owner i would never prefer upscaling Just upgraded from 1050ti to rx6700xt and i still have to use upscaling like wtf

Maybe it's because I'm 32 years old, but I liked very much playing Alan Wake 2. I didn't care about dlss or fsr, I just played, period. And oh God if I had fun with it, I almost forgot this sensation of enjoying the game without worrying about the fps... I advise you to play like me, it's liberatory

As always it's not the tech, it's how it's used. Being able to update your game is objectively an amazing thing, and yet it's the cause for so many of our woes as players.

As much as I agree with you that upscaling is a good thing and an excellent way to claw back performance while retaining a games look, there's a huge problem with upscaling at 1080p which is why so many gamers are up in arms. Garbage in, garbage out, and at 720p internal there simply isn't enough information to reconstruct images with. I think it's partially not enough effort put in the settings menu and the low preset, partially an overreliance on upscaling (at 1080p specifically) and also devs being too keen to switch to RT in the entirety of their rendering pipeline when the technology in graphics cards clearly can't keep up. So it's a lot of things really - stagnation in the graphics card market, poor optimisation for low end cards like the 6600 and A750, too much hype and not enough grunt for RT. I'm sure the job cuts and economic contraction in game development has a part to play too.

Some new games (AW2, The Talos Principle 2) already default to either upscaled or "native" output rendering, always going through DLSS, FSR, XeSS or some temporal AA tech, but no direct (internal) render path. At some point in the future, the all those upscalers will be hard-coded in the game engine and we will be lucky to simply have an option to pick the method, if the auto-detect fails. The internal rendering resolution will be capped to 1080 or 1440 at most or something like that.

I still hate DLSS and fsr. Why? Cause I can’t fucking get above 60 FPS on cyberpunk in god damn native 1440p on a fucking 4080. And that’s without Path tracing at all. I only use the normal Ray tracing.

insane that we need to upgrade our pc every 2 years bc of these badly optimized games

With so many companies laying off a decent chunk of their workforce, the price of goods we need and use on the daily getting crazier and crazier, and a recession that makes 2009's look tame: I can either buy your new fancy shiny looking games or the GPU and CPU to properly run it the way it's meant to be played in another year or three - but right now I can't afford both. People are against a wall right now, financially speaking, and even if super deluxe looking games are coming out that doesn't mean people have the financing to enjoy it. Everyone is stuck using mid-tier GPUs, or top-tier GPUs that are equivalent to today's mid-tier, if even that. As a graphics programmer for 20+ years my opinion is that upscaling technologies are a cheap hack until they can get rid of the temporal artifacts entirely - and I don't see that ever happening, not without neural network models that end up requiring the same compute cost as just rendering pixels natively. You will always have disocclusion issues and reflection/specularity moving the wrong way at times, and these are things that we don't have with native pure raw exact rendering. Games are an interactive medium, motion and action are implied, and these technologies may look nice in screenshots or while the camera is holding still, but that's antithetical to gaming as a whole. I want my fast-paced games to have perfect pixels, every time. These new games coming out can't even run at 1080p at 60FPS on mid-tier GPUs. I guess I'll just go grab some cash from my money tree!

I think we should keep in mind that upscaling will almost certainly continue to improve, such that we may not be able to tell the difference at all between native and say, 67% res scale in the future. Definitely agree that, even now, it's better to use quality dlss or fsr instead of turning down settings, since the picture quality isn't that different, while the performance increase is.

Quite a good explanation, so Ill throw my two cents in aswell. We might be at the next breaking point when it comes to overall graphics, games never looked as good but things like art direction are getting left behind, look at borderlands 2 and bioshock infinite, old games that still hold up because they are stylized to a point where it doesnt matter as much, modern games are often times goodlooking but boring. Also the raw horsepower required to play them with a decent framerate has skyrocketed. Alan Wake II and Darktide are both pure eyecandy, but that doesnt justify how a 4090, the fastest GPU ever, is being held in a chokehold by them and in my opinion upscaling is a bailout Things are going way too fast, half-@ssed games with poor performance optimization that need at least another year in the oven being released to the public to make a quick buck cant become the new norm, doesnt matter if they try to sway us with fancy pictures

Yes it is. It's still excusing poor programming, caused by greedy, rushed development cycles dictaded by some scummy CEOs.

The answer is the same: YES. Now DLSS/FSR is required to even play the game, not because the game requires it because it's graphics is so good, but because they can now finally drop in DLSS and forget to optimize their game at all. DLSS brought back laziness in the Gaming-Industry; and helps them to reduce QA-Cost. Who needs a good working optimized game, just put in DLSS and call it a day. And Fake Frames now even allow more laziness!

Hard disagree on this one. I still see the smudges when activating FSR or using DLSS. From odd flickers, shimmering and even dithering. The very fact that to get a decent quality looking experience you have to spend quite a sum amount of money is ridiculous. Game development have outpaced the hardware industry, and to make things worst, the hardware industry definitely overcharges on GPUs. At the moment, it's still clear to me that up-scaling is ruining my video game playing experience. PS. I've played Alan Wake 2, i have to upscale all the way to performance/ultra performance on certain scenes. It's absolutely noticeable that it's not running on native res.

The problem isn't "optimization." The problem is the end of Moore's Law. Devs aren't relying on upscaling because they're lazy. It's literally impossible to keep improving on graphics at the expected rate with traditional rendering that previously was based on the doubling of transistors every 18 months.

The problem is not the technology of the upscaler's, but how its being used as a crutch for bad optimization in many cases. When you develop a game you have to design the game/engine to work well with the hardware available and adjust the quality of assets and effects accordingly. The main problem I have been seeing with newer games that low vs high with textures difference is minor. The fact is that some are using downsampled 4k assets and not using separate assets based on the setting/resolution used. Which is partly why we been seeing 8gb gpu's struggle even at 1080p with some games.

The technology in and of itself is amazing, but it is being used as a crutch by developers, so yes, it is ruining games because of developers.

There's two ways to look at it. Devs can use it as a crutch to cover for bad optimisation, or they can use it to bring graphics quality level that would have never been possible before upscaling. In a few short years, we went from Ray Tracing being a dream to now playing games with Path Tracing at playable frame rates. Like it or not, upscaling is what made the dream a reality in 2023.

I am disappointed that you didn't covered the Console portion of upscalers, given they're practically kickstarted the whole upscaling industry starting in PS4 Pro / Xbox One X mid-gen refresh. manly because we're been introduced to Checkerboard Rendering, Temporal Anti-Aliasing and Temporal Injection/Upsampling, in fact: you can actually use Insomniac's in-house solution on the PC version of their recent games if you like!

Great channel, looking forward to seeing more videos :)

Thanks Vex, enjoyed the video, but i was so distracted by you cat investing in the background. 👍

Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter what we want or like, not as long as devs just move in this direction. It doesn't matter if you don't want to use DLSS if every new game releasing is made with it in mind. Sooner or later people are going to have make a choice, upscale or stop gaming.

I think we're just moving too fast with graphics when hardware clearly isn't ready for it yet. We need to take a step back and realize that these UE5 technologies are not something that we can really run atm, they are (imo) at least 2 or 3 generations ahead of their time. We shouldn't be forcing change like this before we're ready

I think the community's strong opposition to upscaling stems at least in part from PCMR memelording back when consoles first started using upscaling techniques later into the console cycles in order to squeeze performance out of dated hardware. A stigma got attached to what is ultimately just an alternative implementation of AA, as dumbed down as that is. AA is how we have been able to avoid needing to supersample images in order to eliminate jaggies this entire time, creating details which ought to not be visible at native resolutions. In a way, native has never been native. But something about using the natural successor to the PS4's 'checkerboard rendering' is rubbing a lot of people up the wrong way.

You make an excellent point. I faced issue with Baldurs gate 3 on my midrange laptop. But there was genuinely no real difference between low and high graphics. Only DLSS seemed to fix performance.

I knew this will become mainstream the moment I've seen what DLSS and FSR do. If i buy a 400$+ GPU im expecting to play everything at max(except RT) for at least 2-3 years on 1080p, no upscaling, with a decent frame rate. If i can't do that in a game, that game is either very unoptimized or is a tech demo. Upscaling was supposed to help GPUs after 3-4 years of life, not being mandatory on current gen GPUs.

I really think we shouldn't go this way until gpu's can render it at native resolution and i don't care if that still takes another 5 to 10 years

Hey, what's the song playing in the background at 9:22 ? I know it's an OST from a game and it sounds familiar.

A fix for real time rendering in my opinion could be a reintroduction of sliders. Before we had a choice between low medium and high quality static assets. But those are gone in favour of real time rendering options that automate that. However it is currently just stuck at the highest setting of that by default. What things like nanite and ray tracing could do is at set performance targets and scale up and down the level of detail based on those targets. Like Dynamic resolution scaling but for rays and lod of models. This way instead of the details being lower only because your hardware literally can't make them any higher and running at 30fps. It doesn't make them the highest possible quality, instead compromising it to push back up to 60 in real time.

DLSS is ruining my 2023 game experience

When developing a game the game should get a target framerate of 60 fps on max settings for the base rtx gpus with true optimization and have dlss as an afterthought but at the same time focusing on making the game much more scalable for the weaker gpus but things like nanite can still be used with less triangles which would run extremely well and also give people the option between rasterized lighting or lumen / ray tracing

I completely forgot DLSS 3.5 was a thing, and I was playing away on cyberpunk on a 4090 on basically max settings (under psycho) i saw a youtube short talking about DLSS 3.5 so I decided to try it now. So previously, I was running at around 70 fps on 4k, when I turned DLSS 3.5 on, I was running 100 fps, at 4k, at the highest settings possible. Its crazy

Each of these new upscalers is also a temporal anti aliasing method. Upscaling part is 'just' the resolve to the larger framebuffer. (Except FSR1 which needed final antialiased image to work decently.) A lot of the quality issues would be visible with using them on native resolution. Iteration time is also a part of the reason why developers are moving away from light baking. (And in case of nanite perhaps high to low poly normal maps.) Baseline has changed with new generation, a quite bit of work may be needed from testers and peogrammers to change options to go lower than that and keep the feel of the game intact.

I think the major issue with these tech is the devs these days force you to use them like imagine a generation that if don't have High-end gpu you can only play with High latency and and low base resolution and sadly you don't have to imagine anymore

If I want to 240+ fps and 4K for call of duty what specs do I need or graphic cards

Another big problem with increasing the baseline requirements is upscaling was used to help people with weaker GPU's. Now, weaker GPU's have just been left in the dust completely. Unplayable even with upscaling. Baking lighting isn't that hard to implement, either.

Dlss and fsr is for budget gpus. If i pay 1000usd i expect a flawless experiance at 4k

This is something i only recently realized and im glad someone is bringing this up. Many recent games have such little scalability on its settings. I still get bothered a lot by FSR artifacts and sizzling, Deathloop is one of the few where i felt fine using it.

I think it depends on the resolution you use, I use my TV as a monitor and for some reason I can't use another resolution other than 1360x768 (because of overscan, even changing settings in the AMD software I can't solve it) the image in the end is very bad, depending on if the game needs to see very far it ends up being impossible , since this technology is only good above 1440p

We're seeing the cusp between 2 techs. We've mastered rasterization, but have only touched all this new stuff with upscaling and ray tracing (and let's mention frame generation). The graph is called Gartner hype graph or something like that, I think you should look it up Vex. We're at the plateau of rasterization and have only relatively recently hit the trigger for upscaling and ray tracing. The thing is, the plateau of new tech is gonna be higher than that of rasterization, but the trigger is lower, and the inflated hype is through the roof. Combine this with AAA devs being run by people who haven't played a game in 10 years and only see gaming as #1 money printer and with gamers not exactly being known for being a welcoming bunch that embraces big change, and you get this awkward phase where we are now TL:DR We need to wait for the transition from rasterization to new tech to happen and then we're gonna see it smoothed over with upscaling. Then upscaling and ray tracing are gonna be the new requirement

Upscaling is supposed to be icing on the cake, not a requirement to run games smoothly.

Dude seems knowledgeable and nice, hope he gains a lot of subscribers in the future

Using spectator tools in these games going under the maps reveals why most of them are not optimized well, devs have left so much stuff on purpose it seems, even plague tale requiem has building with active shaders under the map.

I really hate gaming now because of this upscaling thing.No games run properly without fake frames and fake pixels

unfortunately the 80/20 rule applies to games too. Getting 80% of the way to having photo realism is 20% of the work. The last 20% is 80% of the work. Without upscaling modern gaming consoles would need absurd specs and be completely unaffordable.

Exactly what I'm confused about the community upscalers help raise the bar on the graphical settings of todays games. I mostly spent most of my game time on lower settings because of my low end hardware and settling with poor visual but now with upscalers I can enjoy more graphical settings like good looking shadows, descent textures and whatnot

I think it's ruining developers, not just games. I think the push to get realistic games rather than fun games is ruining the gaming experience for many people. Games nowadays are about eye candy and visual effects, rather than trying to be the most fun, exciting, or quirky game that everyone will talk about. I mean look at Minecraft. It's graphics leave a lot to be desired but it's fun. Yeah you can add mods to use RTX and other stuff, but it's a fun game.

My only issue is devs relying on upscaling a bit too much rather than actually programming their games to run well on various hardware. I mean, just look at Alan Wake 2. Even using something like a 2080Ti or 3070, the damn game struggles. Even WITH FSR or DLSS enabled. That's absolutely ridiculous. What's the point of an uspcaling algorithm if your flagship card from only a few years ago can barely hit 30-40fps unless it's internally rendering at 720p? Lol

Thank you for giving nvidia the green light to release 8gb vram GPU for $700 which will force us the average gamer to buy just because our old gpu cant run the latest dlss bs..

dude i love your vids but please buy a shielded xlr cable for the love of god

I really can't get used to this playing PC games since i was a baby. I recently thought: hey i just upgraded my PC i should go and play cyberpunk now, should run pretty okay right?. Ran about 40 FPS in intense areas with RTX reflections off, but lighting on. Rest on ultra no DLSS. So i started turning down settings for things like volumetric clouds and such. I could not see a single difference in the clouds or my FPS. I just turned on DLSS quality, and played the game around 60 FPS in intense areas, and had a good time. But it annoys the fuck out of me that the settings basically do fuck all outside off RTX, upscaling, and frame generation. Imagine a game like Crysis dropped nowadays, but everyone could only play on ultra at 15FPS lol.

Upscaling tech is just good stuff. BUT, seems like most of game developing companies give any shoot on optimization. I always wonder why DLSS/FSR options are written in system requirement sheet.

In my opinion I think the main issue is all these technologies were rolled out way too early to farm revenue on hype. Ray tracing, lumen, nanite, etc. are all fantastic but we currently don't have the processing power to do it effectively and efficiently at the same time.

Music used in video?

I believe that many people in the pc space would agree that upscaling is to be used as a boost and not a requirement. the devs can include all the fancy graphics but just keep it realistic for those who don't want or have cards that can upscale. 60 fps should be a recommended spec without upscalers involved on a modest gpu. They need to be honest in their spec requirements and not say a 3050 can hit 60 fps but it really mean with the most aggressive upscaler options.

Spending 5 minutes enabling dlss in the engine is not the same thing as spending actual time working on optimising your game. Dlss is the exact opposite of optimisation as it has allowed Devs to save time and NOT optimise their games.

simple solution : dont buy any unoptimazed game until they optimaze it bcs its so obvious that these companies are trying to push old hardware players to change their old gpus and buy the new broken 4000 series

bro kidnapped the pc builder Jason's cat 😂

I don't usually comment in videos, but after a bunch of years working building pcs and keeping up with changes from gen to gen, I feel like I can point some good things here. This isn't the first time we see games running good only on top tier cards, and it need to happen so we get the new stuff to be accessible, but the problem we see in upscaling is when the game doesn't deliver the graphics or physics upgrade it should for the perfomance cost we are seing. Games like remnant 2, hogwarts legacy, the bad port of the last of us are a good exemple of this problem. Alan wake I think is not the same case of unoptimized game, it just is really heavy load for gpus, as it uses well the new tecnologies and improve the experience while you play. So it gets us in really a bad place for pc gaming right now, because while this transition occurs, maybe we need to get new graphics cards each 1 or 2 gens to keep with all the new tech, as before we could stay with the same card for a longer time before it gets obsolete. Looks like Cyberpunk 2.0 is at the same spot as Alan wake when we talk about the upgrade we should get for the performance it costs. Another problem is the we are getting down the moore's law, maybe we are getting to the silicon limit, so we can't rely on upgrading brute performance anymore to run games, and upscalling and AI is an alternative to solve this problem too.

DLSS is great. FSR is booty cheeks

I think it's a complicated issue. I'm on the side that this is the way to go moving forward as it enables a faster development time, which given the recent trends that games are in such huge scales (which I'm not trully a fan of tbh) that development takes more than half a decade it's a welcome change, BUT I think we're going this direction TOO SOON, the tech to do this isn't here yet at affordable prices to make it not an option. On the one hand, using this tech is alienating most of the consumer base that doesn't have these new and shiny features, which is really anti-consumer, this shouldn't be the new standard until 70-80% of the market has already switched to being capable of running this. On the other hand, GPU designers are spending a lot of resources into developing these technlogies and if they aren't being used they may get dropped or most likely their development will be slowed down.

I think the best part of upscaling is the fact that it can help older GPU to at least Run more recent games in a decent FPS. I have a friend who owns a GTX 1050 to this day, and using ADM/Intel upscaling helped him a lot to run more recent games stably.

It's when they mention some games like 20 times in driver changes, but the flight sims you actually update drivers for, which are popular, don't ever get mentioned in changelogs. Shooter and racing games almost every driver update!

Alan wake 2 is pretty well optimised IMO. Its peoples disdain for having to play on low to get good FPS. The game still looks gorgeous on low!!!!

No they don't have to make the game twice, all they have to do is add a very advanced graphics settings menu that allow the player to tweak for performance, its very easy and can be achieved in any game engine even UE5.

Yes it is runing gaming. In new game Robocop effects are kind of a pixelated, and If you turn ON Dlss it looks like DLSS is not upscalling those effects so you get even more pixels. Not to mention that ofcourse DLSS is making game less readable because of DLSS artifacts, not smooth screen, and visible resolution lines.

These are growing pains, friends. The issue is not upscaling, it's low VRAM.

I would rather play a game with no shadows, reflections, particle effects or other fancy looking eye candy. And have the game run on potato mode looking awful, then use upscalers. All the upscalers introduces graphical artifacts in all games theyre inn and as someone who really notice the small details it feels like the game image is less "stable", it feels mushy and shimmering. I would rather not buy a game at all then ever use upscalers, wich is why I skipped several games I normally would be interested inn and just play indie games or older AAA games in my steam library instead. I dont care about why and how, this is the pc platform, the platform of choice, and I chose to never upscale anything. Native rendering or bust. Its a dealbreaker to me, so you all enjoy your upscaled games idc anymore :)

I am the furthest from an expert, so even I don't put stock in my opinion on this 😅.. but i am suffering from "old man syndrome" , where fake frames and all these tricks feels icky to me. But, I've similarly felt icky about new things (such as digital games over physical media). I'll have to evolve eventually

The Doki Doki literature club music in the background 💀

I'm not upset about the new technology change the way game render, it's truly impressive. What I DO upset about is that the company such as NVIDIA is feature the hardware component that work with these at a ridiculous pricing. And another thing to upset is that the game dev generally relying on upscaling too much, when technically speaking upscaling technology is still on it early stage. Take ARK ascended for example, world strongest gaming computer that had an i9-13900k/14900k with an RTX 4090 and the game still run like piece of crap without upscaling. They're basically think that with the upscaler technology, they can just throw in every think they think it's ideal for their game without actually thinking that optimization still exist. Upscaling is nice, but making game without need to think how well it would run (even on very modern and good hardware) meaning that upscaling technology isn't ready to be the core of developing games.

Yes dlss is still ruining games. As you said if FSR can get to 90-95% of the image quality that DLSS can then devs should never put in DLSS and just make the FSR2 in their game the best looking they can. There is no reason a game dev should spend time on a tech that can only be used by one vendor, at all. Now I still think FSR3 should have gone for the image quality crown but that is getting off topic.

When we look at settings of any game, which was made before these brand-famous upscalers but still with new tech like Dx 11, we can easily see those settings are NOT so much different than FSR/DLSS/XeSS in their underlying logic. Back in the day, lowering a shadow setting actually lowered shadow resolution. Reflection details? Resolution. Lighting quality? Number of the rays per pixel (yes, there are rays even in older technologies, too. They are just not bouncing multiple times), so tied to the resolution. World detail? Switching to lower detailed model which was originally meant for low resolution displaying. Lowering the render resolution is almost equal to dropping all the settings one step down at the same time. New upscalers have two advantages: they can use highest res textures, as long as VRAM allows, and they can cleverly rebuild the final image. I am an admirer of all types of new techniques. But I still believe, a game's ultra settings should aim for actual ultra at an actual luxury resolution at -min- 60FPS with the highest GPU in the market as of its release date. A 4090 owner should be able to play a 2023 game at 4K 60 FPS with an actual render resolution of 3840x2160. Owners of anything lower should have the option to individually adjust settings or use upscalers. Any sane customer should boycott a game which humiliates their 1000++ $ card just because some lazy developers (or some inpatient shareholders) forced a game into release by relying on upscalers in their performance mode. A company may want to get your money without actually respecting you or their own work by simply selling FOMO products but you guys buy your hardware and games with your hard-earned money.

Is this feature that makes your PC take 11 years to respond to your mouse/keyboard inputs from the abysmal latency it adds ruining the gaming experience? Idk you tell me.

DLSS isn't ruining games. It was meant to improve your fps while making the game look better. FSR might be the thing that ruined games because it made the technology available to everyone, and thus developers can relay on it.

Baking very much depends on the game. In Overwatch or Remnant II (which doesn't use Lumen) the level design is either entirely static, or pseudo-static with a somewhat limited game space. This allows you to bake lights and consume some extra disk space while doing so. This wont cut it for an open-world title due to disk space, or a world where you have a lot of dynamic changes. You have to compute light in realtime, and this costs a lot of compute. Lumen and Nanite kicks in the door. As a game-dev you now have to choose between making a game which is like your Overwatch or Doom:Eternal being fast-paced and using the usual bag of tricks to get to 120+ FPS. Or you go for higher image quality, which trades off a lot of FPS to do so, but allows you to plug into far more realistic light computation. Both game types can be highly optimized, but how they choose to slice their computation budget is very different. For the latter game type, upscaling is another strong lever you have as a game developer. In many cases, you get better image quality by retaining expensive geometry and light computations and upscaling, than lowering your computational budget. So if your target is something like 30 or 60 fps for a game, then upscaling allows you to shift even more of your computational budget to accuracy.

Upscalling was a good thing...until it became mandatory. Can't seem to play most AAA games without some sort of upscalling

What's your cat's name?

Stop it is simply put that they are leaving 40 - 45% of gamers out in the cold. How by making their cards obsolete . Now this is a must happen yet to just all of a sudden and a 4060ti at those prices is a huge slap in the face to all those people.

IMO all methods to "reduce the work needed to render the same graphics" is legitimate, whether it is through culling, LOD, better graphics driver or upscaling. However, I think upscaling is destined to be an intermediate step in the progress of "smart" rendering through machine learning. The eventual goal should be "can we build something that outputs complex 3D scenes without having to deal with complex geometric computations needed to render at high resolution". There already exist early but impressive research that can take a 3D scene and directly output a camera view from any angle, skipping the traditional rendering pipeline altogether. I think the future would be something that effectively combines the precision of traditional rendering and the efficiency of machine learning techniques. Upscaling uses both traditional rendering and ML, but it doesn't skip any of the steps of the rasterisation route, and we are just doing "post-processing". It is effective for now, but I think eventually will be replaced by tighter integration between "brute-force rendering" and "smart rendering".

If the new technology is really that demanding, new game should not have it on by default. If your game can’t run at 4K 60 FPS on the new consoles and you have a game that you did not develop properly. The new consoles should be your baseline. You should be hitting 4K 60 on those systems. If you can’t do that with the “standard” of gaming (which would be the consoles because they are the up-to-date system from the gaming manufacturers) technologies, then you need to turn them off. The problem with modern gaming is that devs keep “updating” games and require, stronger and stronger GPU’s each year whenever technologies is not developing that fast. Devs should be forced on a console generation for years because that’s the only thing that keeps them in check. Starting with PS4 Pro and Xbox one X we’ve seen a dramatic change to constantly upgrading hardware just to get acceptable frame rates. People like gaming but people don’t want to spend $1000 just to run a game well and then have to do that all over again in two years. People either want to spend a little money now and have a acceptable performance level; or spend big money and have the console or GPU last. We’re still Midway of what would be considered a console generation, people are just now acquiring PlayStation fives and Xbox series X for the first time. Or maybe be a new graphics card to be able to run the games. And yet it’s no longer good enough, new cards don’t have enough Vram or performance to run games at 60fps at 4k (the new standard). And if they can, there extremely expensive. Furthermore they’re gonna be coming out with the pro version of the Xbox and the PlayStation. People are fed up because instead of getting something that will last long-term everything is becoming outdated extremely quickly and it’s extremely costly and it’s all because of the devs and implementing technology that are hardware cannot truly support. Even if can it has to be the bleeding edge. People do not want to have to upgrade every generation they want their hardware to last that goes for PCs and consuls.

thought it was just me going crazy trying every config of settings in warzone with no effect

I feel like for the nanite part I still do not like it having to render the better looking version of the model as I may not be paying attention to the models I don't see and for Dlss it really depends I feel like the further Nvidia, Amd and Intel try to better these they will look as good as native even on 1080p if they keep innovating these solutions to possible fps boosts and such. Making graphics cards take less power or make it take the same but for way way better fps. It really depends on the implementation of dlss cause I feel like low settings do look good but for the frames it should be more like optimized especially since people playing different games and all some just may want to play it for the story and care less for the visual quality. While obviously people with High End May like the raytraced and all the non baked lights environments. Also another thing I like with upscalers is that xess looks really sharp and crisp in some games such as dlss does for using the game engine to know what it is on intel gpus. Thing is just the game engines themselves feel like they should be more optimized because of how some scenes that shouldn't even be taxing to the power of the system.

I dont know if the Upscalers are the problem here its more about people that has last gen graphic cards like 3060,3070, rx 6700 etc. are feeling already outdated because we have to relay so much on DLLS/FSR and not enjoy our 1440p or even 4k monitors

I don't like anti aliasing with temperal components because they look too soft on low resolutions like 1080p. I prefer a shimmering sharp image over a mushed soft one.

I think you hit the nail last month, its about high end looking games with the unreal engine and not proper optimization.

digital foundry folks says that its about the quality of pixels, not the quantity of pixels.

They could fix this by just being more honest and limiting the placebo-ish settings available. If all those settings make little performance difference, but upscaling does. Then maybe have basic video mode settings (vsync, display resolution, refresh rate, etc...) and then just have "native, partially upscaled, upscaled, and highly upscaled be the three basic settings replacing traditional "very high, high, medium, and low". Most gamers aren't technical like you and I, they just want lowering the settings to increase fps even if it looks a bit worse. We don't ultimately care if that's done by lowering LOD's or Ambient Occlusion samples, or by increasing upscaling. Low just needs to run way better than Very High

I'm still playin on 1080p and the only game i ever played with upscaling was hogwarts and i think Deadspace remake. It always looks bad and is very noticable. I finally got a replacement for my 1070 on the way, so hopefully I'm good for a couple years again. I'm still unsure if i want a 1440p monitor, it looks really nice but on the other hand I dont want to ruin 1080p gaming for me if that makes sence. I grew very fond of 144hz and the 6750xt can finally deliver on that i hope

Some game I played recently had it enabled automatically. I noticed what it was immediately because the character's face looked like a smudge. Not having too low of a pixel density to convey features, but a smeary non-face "thing". Performance aside, DLSS has only ruined games from my experience. The only usage I can see for something like this is on low end cards that need an artificial boost. If you're already spending the big bucks it should be able to perform without assistance

DLSS should NEVER be a requirement at a GPU's target resolution to get a playable Framerate i.e. a game running on an RTX 3060 should not require DLSS in order to achieve 60FPS at 1080p, RTX 3070 at 1440p or a 3090 at 4K

Great Video. Upscaling is a great technology. I think it's crazy not to use it at this point.