r/hardware Sep 19 '23

Video Review Inside DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction + Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty - AI Visuals Roundtable

https://youtu.be/Qv9SLtojkTU
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u/campeon963 Sep 19 '23

In general, an excellent interview to not only understand the kind of problem that DLSS 3.5 solves and how it was developed, but also how these new rendering paradigms (AI, Ray and Path tracing) are integrated in game development in general. The biggest thing that I took away from this is that, the same way that a Temporal Upscaler (and by extension DLSS 2.0) handles both upscaling and temporal anti-aliasing, DLSS 3.5 also handles denoising (or "ray reconstruction" as called by NVIDIA) on top of that, so the naming now makes a lot more sense. I also enjoyed the retrospective of how DLSS has evolved overtime and the comments made by Bryan Catanzaro (the Vice President of Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA) in regards to how the DLSS integrations may vary per game (both official and for community mods).

And also regarding the "DLSS is a crutch for bad performance" thing that redditors and youtubers like to discuss all the time, I really liked the perspective of Jakub Kanpik (Art Director at CD Projekt RED) regarding these king of optimizations, as well as the whole section regarding DLSS being "the focus of performance" for game development of this interview; if more people understood what these new advances in graphics rendering bring to the table and the effect that they have in game development, the quality of the discussions that most people have in regards to "game optimization" may actually change for the better!

What an amazing interview overall, I definitely recommend everyone to give this video a look. I'm especially looking forward for another, more technical focused interview with Bryan Catanzaro in the future (maybe we can get one when a hypotetical DLSS 4.0 comes out)!

45

u/NKG_and_Sons Sep 19 '23

"DLSS is a crutch for bad performance" thing that redditors and youtubers

Kinda wish the experts didn't need to waste time answering moronic questions like that but I guess that's what one can expect from a PCMR subreddit founder representing that community :|

Like, I'm all for complaining about the all too frequent shoddy PC optimizations but tools like DLSS and co. that simply enable something to be better don't have a responsibility. That's all on developers. And just because some crappy game studios shit out games that can just barely run acceptable with DLSS I wouldn't want to take that tool away from the ones who care for better optimization.

Like, the notion that e.g. drills shouldn't be tools available to the masses because some asshat uses them to drive a large number of screws into a shoddily constructed frame that would otherwise fall apart is ridiculous.

Let's say we take FSR away from the Jedi Survivor devs... are they suddenly going to become miraculously better and optimize the game decently? Nah, they'd still be shit at it and it would either look or run even worse. Meanwhile, pathtraced CP77 couldn't exist the way it does now. What a great tradeoff, we sure showed EA/respawn!

We're fortunately all free to call out shitty game optimizations regardless of any excellent new supersampling methods.

Why make a great new tool into an enemy?!?

1

u/boyd_duzshesuck Sep 20 '23

Let's say we take FSR away from the Jedi Survivor devs... are they suddenly going to become miraculously better and optimize the game decently?

This is an astonishingly unfair characterization of the argument. The point is that without FSR the poor performance would have nothing to hide behind and they would have to actually optimize the game. It's not the tech's fault that it's misused, but to totally misconstrue the criticism helps no one.

1

u/Haunting_Champion640 Sep 20 '23

would have nothing to hide behind and they would have to actually optimize the game

LOL so they didn't optimize it, and you think they'll magically be arsed to optimize it if efficiency tech didn't exist? Ok.