Oh, yeah, I didn’t see those. I think my point still stands though, really those specular highlights shouldn’t be that bright, but the AI can figure out that it’s plausible for them to be brighter and that it would fit the target style better.

Yeah, probably the main reason it’s getting the little bit of praise that it does is that they’re showing it off on games with fairly flat-looking skin shaders. Unfortunately a problem with this sort of thing is that getting that “2023” image is the result of giving a whole team a huge amount of time to model one man’s face. If you’re Bethesda and you just want to get NPCs into Starfield, it would be a similar amount of work. A bit less, since the first people already gave a talk on it, but still much more work then just getting a diffuse BRDF with some subsurface scattering and calling it good. But you also need a process that can be applied to every single NPC…

And looking at Striking Distance Studios, the company where that 2023 image is from:

In February 2025, it was reported that most of the studio’s developers had been laid off.

Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that the work those people put in will never be directly reused.

Another reason the DLSS version looks a bit more realistic there is because of the specular highlights on the eyes, for example. They probably aren’t reflecting anything real, or else they would be there in the original. But the AI knows that specular highlights add realism and are plausible in this scene, so it puts them there. That’s something that an artist could do if given a specific shot and camera angle, but in the general case they can’t really do that without causing problems.

Fun fact that you may or may not have heard before: the light flicker animation in Half Life Alyx is actually the exact same one used in the original Quake. Half Life 1 was built on the Quake engine, and the same animation was carried over into Source and then Source 2.

https://www.alanzucconi.com/2021/06/15/valve-flickering-lights/

sounds like that’s planned but maybe not in yet

yep, I got through about 50 hours of Subnautica at ~15 fps back in the day.

Even portal with RTX is kinda playable on the steam deck though if you use that config that one person made to enable fsr3 and do some default settings changes, and put the gpu clock up to full

Sure, I could definitely see situations where it would be useful, but I’m fairly confident that no current games are doing that. First of all, it is a whole lot easier said than done to get real-world data for that type of thing. Even if you manage to find a dataset with positions of various features across various biomes and train an AI model on that, in 99% of cases it will still take a whole lot more development time and probably be a whole lot less flexible than manually setting up rulesets, blending different noise maps, having artists scatter objects in an area, etc. It will probably also have problems generating unusual terrain types, which is a problem if the game is set in a fantasy world with terrain that is unlike what you would find in the real world. So then, you’d need artists to come up with a whole lot of datat to train the model with, when they could just be making the terrain directly. I’m sure Google DeepMind or Meta AI whatever or some team of university researchers could come up with a way to do ai terrain generation very well, but game studios are not typically connected to those sorts of people, even if they technically are under the same company of Microsoft or Meta.

You can get very far with conventional procedural generation techniques, hydraulic erosion, climate simulation, maybe even a model of an ecosystem. And all of those things together would probably still be much more approvable for a game studio than some sort of machine learning landscape prediction.

I don’t know of any games that use machine learning for procedural generation and would be slightly surprised if there are any. But there is a little bit of a distinction there because that is required at runtime, so it’s not something an artist could possibly be involved in.

Are there any alternatives that are decently fast for large files? My computer and my phone both get at least 300 mbps from the router, and I have yet to find a local file transfer application that will be anywhere near that fast for large files (destiny, local send, kde connect, might have tried others, I don’t remember)

The index was a good headset when it came out 6 years ago. It isn’t really anymore. (In terms of visual quality at least)

This isn’t new, the features have been in the app for a while now

for 4 Linux would also kind have the same problem as a 3rd party ROM, (almost) no one is making mobile apps for Linux

Sure, there are a lot of desktop apps, but most don’t have a mobile UI in mind

Samsung, Xiaomi and OnePlus have removed the option of bootloader unlocking on all of their devices.

Got me worried (bc i have a newish oneplus phone) but apparently OnePlus is only doing that in China for now. Still not a good sign for the future…

I’ve used some slightly weird hardware but haven’t experienced anything of what you described. Across the whole range from the lab server with 3 3090s and 500gb of ram to my $40 Chromebook I got on ebay

I suspect that if you’re now playing where everyone else gets the same advantages, that ruins the fun of having cheats

If not and the cheats themselves are just that fun to use, sure, add it in as another gamemode

It had an email for uverse at the bottom which I am pretty sure is residential? Idk

That doesn’t seem that difficult?

https://www.falconitservices.com/att-comcast-and-reverse-dns-ptr-request/

I don’t really stay on top of my gmail that often, but my spam folder has basically exactly the same stuff in it that my inbox has. Just a bunch of random emails from services that I signed up for an account on or bought something from and none of which I particularly care about. There’s not really much that I can tell differentiating what gets marked as spam or not either.

I know that camera hardware does not return hdr values. So something in the actual conversion from/in the sensor (idk how cmos sensors work) would have to be affected by the white balance for changing it in the camera software to do lose a significant amount more information than changing it after the picture was taken. Unless the conversion from a raw image also is a factor, but raw images aren’t hdr either so I don’t really see how that could cause much significant difference.

If the white balance only dims colors and doesn’t brighten them then it couldn’t possibly clip anything and would have the same effect as lowering the exposure originally (with the new white balance) to avoid a clipped highlight.

I’m not a photography guy (just a computer graphics guy) so idk what the software usually does (I suspect it would avoid clipping? You could also brighten something with a gamma curve for example to prevent clipping…) but I can’t find anything online about sensors having hardware support for white balance adjustment.

After some more testing I think the OnePlus one isn’t usually that bad, it just works terribly in low light

I’m surprised that it loses dynamic range. White balance is actually built into the camera hardware?