I mean he’s gotta say people are wrong for not liking it, it’s his job to sell it

This is long winded but I firmly believe this explains a lot about the industries frenzied push into all these odd directions… All of it. Here seems as good as any place to dump this mess I’ve been stewing on:

I really think it’s important that raytracing, while novel, wasn’t created to improve visuals. It wasnt created to make a programmers life easier. It was created because it was computationally difficult and could be optimized for. It was a fantastic play by nvidia. They created a feature that functionally did very little but they could get an entire cycle ahead of the competition in that optimization. Differentiation of products, in a duopoly, is a big deal. Amd dove right into it - knowing full well that this would leave them brutally behind… But this was a fortuitous event: despite the disadvantage.

Why? Simple. GPUs have been struggling against Moore’s law. Framerates were exceeding ranges even monitors can refresh at. And worse yet there was another hard limit: our eyes. How do you sell cards that have no perceivable value?

Reality is we may well be reaching a point where additional resolutions and framerates dont matter. Badly optimized games only buy so much time.

These companies aren’t stupid. Crypto? They loved it. Computationally expensive. Always need faster… Until we didnt. What now? Demand was plummeting for overpriced high end cards.

Go back and look at when AI and nvidia got in bed. The earnings call was due to be a bloodbath after all these cards were rotting on shelves, unpurchased, and depreciating daily. It was coming ro light that they had been selling cards to miners under the table and that was going to get ugly fast. I have never, in my life, heard a company talk so much about a product on a earnings call – that wasn’t theirs. Not a word breathed about unsold cards barely any numbers discussed. ChatGPT referenced so many times that there was confusion as to whether nvidia actually owned it. The Q/A at the end was comedy gold. People were so confused.

AI was the perfect save. AI is a power virus. Want to fix the black box? Train a black box to mangage that black box. Its a computational sinkhole. They’ve extracted value from gamers to dimishing returns. Meanwhile they can sell the ultimate snake oil to investors: virtual slave labor. Unpaid workers. In floods private equity. Gamers stopped mattering immediately. All of these advances are software. From a GPU design company. Why? It shuts up the peasants while they continue rebranding the “snake oil” to get whoever is buying. Weve nearly achieved the panacea. Just a bit longer!

Behold: we have dressed our industry in the finest of the emperors newest clothes. You can either start selling them or be the only one who doesn’t.

🫧

My main problem is that, even if the technology were to work exactly as advertised, for the first time, PC gaming is moving to an era where our games no longer look the same.

We’ve all seen how every previous version of DLSS worked. The promise of lowering system requirements of high resolutions caught enough attention to draw a crowd, game devs used it to increase the system requirements for lower resolutions instead, AMD and Intel had to develop their own different implementation to stay competitive, and lots of mainstream gaming now requires DLSS and the like on all but the most expensive cards (sometimes even then).

The tech will get better. It always does. Whether that improvement will come fast or slow doesn’t really matter. I think most points of controversy will fade as we’re starting to see this applied to new games. After all, if a game were to be developed knowing that it would be using DLSS 5, the argument that artistic intent will be violated will hold less strength. If DLSS 5 were to ruin the artistic intent of a ground-up DLSS 5-developed game, it wouldn’t be shipped. Future titles being “DLSS 5±mindful” and future improvements to the AI used should get the technology working ever closer to the vision that is being advertised today.

But when that starts to happen, the story will play out exactly the same as it always has for DLSS. It creates results that are “good enough”, so game devs move their development resources elsewhere. Then some management layer catches onto this tech, and finds out that they can just take these resources and move them right into their personal paycheck. End result is games that look generations old and barely run unless you use DLSS 5. By then FSR and XeSS will have to follow suit; if they don’t, AMD and Intel will have the cards that are not only comparatively featureless and weaker, but also produce uglier visuals. But because these generative AI models will never be the exact same between these manufacturers, the output will also never be the same.

And then we move to the weird reality where games look different on different cards, and driver (or, in the case of consoles, system) updates could fundamentally change what games look like, independent of developer input (turns out that artistic integrity can still end up in jeopardy, huh). And unlike with the current AI upscalers we have, where there is a ground truth for the result and we can always obtain it with better hardware, DLSS 5-developed games will always have to rely on it for their “fancy effects” (read: looking like something other than a GameCube game in 2030).

That’s my problem with DLSS 5

Remember, he’s never talking to us, he’s talking to major stockholders.

Ah fuck, more generative AI!

“No, actually, you’re completely wrong!”

OK…? Then what is it?

“It’s generative AI.”

“Well, first of all, they’re completely wrong,”

Proceeds to explain exactly what everyone hates about it.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again.

Nvidia is destroying gaming.

They started the destruction with the idea of 4k gaming.

When they realized native 4k gaming wasnt going to be feasible… They knocked gaming to the ground and started kicking it in the ribs with this upscaling bullshit, because who doesnt love a 1080p picture shittily stretched to 4k?

And they curb stomped it by making video cards cost more than what most people make in a fucking month.

and they’re beating its unconscious body with bats over this DLSS5 AI obsession bullshit.

and at every step of the way, the gamers were there to deliver dumptrucks of money because they don’t give a fuck about ruining everything as long as they can have their new shiny. Being in the cool kids club by having a new shiny is more important than the havok they are wrecking with their decisions to support this shit.

But don’t worry…They’ll still go online and cry about the unfairness of it all.

and AMD is desperately trying to play catchup so they can try to steal a sliver of the bullshit pie as well, before someone tries to point out me not addressing AMD (since its not the topic), or try to hail it as the saviour of gaming kind.

Trillions invested to make unoptimized games barely run, and make it look worse at the same time, instead of just investing like 1/10th into optimization during dev cycles.

NVIDIA really is like a parasitic cancerous growth on the side of the games industry, it’s existence increasingly predicated on the destruction of current standards, overtaking their function to ensure survival and it’s continuous ever expanding cancerous growth

“completely wrong” and proceeds to say it’s just a “fusion”.

It IS an AI slop filter, and you can take it and shove it up your ass alongside all of your stupid jackets.

By the amount and intensity that this man tries to sell his garbage through sheer bluff and bs you’d think he’s running to be President someday.

“It fuses the controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with the uncontrollable and unpredictable element of generative AI!”

“The consumers don’t know what they want. I, the CEO, know what the consumers want. And the consumers want to give me money!”

I’m glad that I already have all the games I like in my library for years now and none of this bullshit matters to me